by Jeff Koehler
So pluckers look for work elsewhere.
Yet, because of the live-in system and the convoluted laws about firing workers, gardens continue to pay periodically absent workers and cannot easily replace them.
But even if they could, the vacuum is nearly impossible to fill. Estates along main roads can try to import day laborers. Castleton, which edges Kurseong, for instance, is in a privileged location, and with absenteeism running around 35 percent, according to one of the garden’s accountants in autumn, it was bringing in a few hundred workers every morning in the back of pickups. These could be seen grinding up the steep, narrow roads to Kurseong in the early morning. But busing in a daily workforce is difficult and expensive and is merely a stopgap. During the 2013 harvests, few gardens were even attempting it. Some tried to make up their labor deficit by offering their own workers higher bonuses or extra plucking hours for those who wanted more work, and by pulling women out of retirement. Others simply chose which sections of the estates to best focus their workers’ energies on.
Mechanizing is not an option. The steepness of the slopes and the selective plucking required make this impossible, while the continually shifting leaf and climate variables make automation in processing tea equally unfeasible.
Ironically Jungpana, long hindered by its isolation and the additional effort in bringing up goods and getting out tea, is seeing the lowest absenteeism in the district. “It’s not an issue,” said Jungpana’s assistant manager, S. K. Choudhary, while walking through the misty monsoon fields of the garden. “Just ten or eleven percent.” For one, it’s too far to go for workers to find other day jobs.*
Labor shortages do not just reduce the quantity of tea a garden can produce, but can also harm its quality. Tea bushes need to be plucked every week, and gardens require a crew that can manage a seven-day plucking round.† The quality of the tea suffers if the leaves cannot be plucked at that interval.
Finding workers is exacerbated by the promise of higher salaries elsewhere. Dreams of a more middle-class lifestyle are drawing the labor pool away from Darjeeling’s gardens, as is the Indian government’s rural-development scheme that offers guaranteed work on low-skilled projects such as road building.
But doubling, even tripling, pay does not appear to offer much of a solution.
“There are three reasons why the labor problem is not only about wages,” explained Sandeep Mukherjee in his office during the first flush. First is education. The parents of today’s workers were illiterate. “Now the kids go to school and don’t want to follow what their parents did.” While many do not finish their studies and few go on to university, they are far from uneducated. The schooling, even half-finished, is a stepping-stone off the garden. At Glenburn, Namring, and many other estates, education is a priority for management, and they do what they can to supplement the government’s resources. Namring has sixteen schools on the estate. The garden now offers a choice between Nepali-medium or English-medium schools. Paradoxically, managers acknowledge they are actively, passionately, and purposefully educating away their future workforce.
Television also plays a major role in the labor problem. Previous generations of pluckers were not exposed to the world beyond the tea estates. They stayed “cooped up” on the garden, spent their whole lives there, and usually knew little outside the hills. Now they have TV and can glimpse the rest of the world. “They can’t help but see what others have and what they have and compare the two.” Mukherjee stopped there, not needing to add the connecting thought: now they want more.
Exposure to education and the world at large has produced aspirations. “They know that if they stay, they will go no further than their parents,” Mukherjee said, watching his cigarette smoke float out an opened window. “They want to go further than their parents.” And the parents want their kids to go further.
One father in his thirties at Castleton Tea Estate stands in for many. His mother had been a plucker on the garden, his grandmother, and most likely his great-grandmother. His wife plucked for two years before she quit. It wasn’t worth it, they decided, and they sold her hereditary position on the estate for Rs 10,000 ($180). Their house was built and renovated by the family, and the garden cannot kick them out, he said, so they continue to live on Castleton but receive nothing from the estate. He works as a driver for a hotel in Kurseong and makes only marginally more than he would on the tea estate—Rs 3,500 (about $65) a month—“but I can learn more, like practice my English,” he said. Here he has hope of advancing. He and his wife have two young daughters and are paying for a private school in Kurseong.
Would he want his daughters to work on the garden? “No way.” He shook his head sharply. If the gardens paid not Rs 90 but, say, double that? “My wife would return,” he thought. His kids? He shook his head again. Rs 400? Rs 600? He kept shaking his head. “If our daughter is working on a tea estate, we are not proud,” he said self-assuredly. “If she is working a government job, we are proud.”
What is happening in Darjeeling is part of a larger, nationwide trend—a global one, actually—of people fleeing rural agricultural work. Indians have become more mobile, able to go out and seek a better—or at least different—life away from the fields. Their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did not have that option. The tea estates in Darjeeling are not immune, and the younger generation is fleeing the Himalayan foothills of their birth.
“No matter how much we pay,” Mukherjee said, “the mind-set has already settled in the younger generation. Anything but pluck tea.”
“There is no solution,” said Rajesh Pareek on Tukvar.
Sanjay Sharma agreed, “There is no solution because it will continue to rise.”
• • •
Another issue for Darjeeling is the separatist movement by ethnic Gorkhas, who make up three-fourths of the region’s population and essentially all of the tea industry’s workforce. Darjeeling is the northernmost part of West Bengal, a state about the size of Maine or Portugal with a population of more than 90 million people (to Maine’s 1.3 million and Portugal’s 10.5 million). Darjeeling remains under the administrative power of Kolkata, at the opposite end of the state some four hundred miles away, although not without significant local opposition. Bandhs, or shutdowns—those who dare open their shop risk having it burnt down—strikes, “agitations,” violence, and curfews have been roiling the area and disrupting life in the hills (and even tea production) as Gorkhas press their demands for their own independent state within India.
The Darjeeling hills have, over centuries, been under the control of Sikkim, Nepal, and Bhutan, and then the British after they scooped it up in the 1830s, but not Bengal, argue statehood proponents, nor has it ever been politically, socially, linguistically, or culturally part of it. Outside the hills, Indian Gorkhas feel—and are treated like—foreigners, they say. “Historically and geographically, Darjeeling, the land of the Indian Gorkhas, has always been part of the Indian Nation—but the people of Darjeeling never were, and have no desire to ever be, part of the State of Bengal. It’s as simple as that,” wrote Basant Lama in the preface of his The Story of Darjeeling,13 relying heavily on italics throughout for emphasis. “All the Indian Gorkha is asking for is that Darjeeling, the land of his forefathers … be once again detached from Bengal and restored to its original status as a separate homeland for the Indian Gorkhas within the constitutional framework of India.”14
Sikkim, to the north of Darjeeling, with a population of only half a million and a land area of just 2,740 square miles (the size of Delaware), has its own state. But not Darjeeling.
According to the current chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, who has reiterated her stand in area rallies, West Bengal and Darjeeling are inseparable. Opponents of Gorkhaland’s aspirations often argue against further fragmenting the country, or even the state. Bengal has been painfully divided before. In 1905 the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, effected the partition of Bengal, only to have it reunited in 1911,
until it was, again, divided in 1947 between West Bengal and East Bengal (which eventually became Bangladesh). Some opponents to independent statehood argue that the Gorkhas are new immigrants, settling only a century and a half ago, recent by Indian standards, and not entitled to carve out their own state.
Gorkhaland statehood demands aren’t new. Calls for autonomy from West Bengal first sounded in 1907. In 1980, the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) was formed and launched a series of often violent protests. In 1987 a forty-day bandh culminated in the establishment of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC). Some years of stability followed. But a harder-line faction within the party thought the GNFL had traded the council for statehood ambitions. With conflicts and infighting marring the organization, a splinter group formed, Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), which took over power of the Darjeeling hills in 2008 and ratcheted up the bid for Gorkhaland with fitful and disruptive agitations.
At the end of January 2011, the GJM began a lengthy bandh—with a single exemption: tea plantations. That changed by early February when police killed three GJM activists. As 2011’s first flush readied to be plucked, the hills were silent, businesses shuttered, roads empty. At the time, the managing director of one of Darjeeling’s largest groups of tea estates said, “If the political problems remain, the Darjeeling tea industry will be ruined.” Another group head agreed: “If political problems and shutdowns continue, it will spell the doom for the Darjeeling tea industry.”15
Politically, though, the move proved effective. In July 2011, the GJM, the West Bengal state government, and the federal Indian government signed an agreement to set up an autonomous administrative body for the Darjeeling hills with substantially more powers over socioeconomic, agricultural, infrastructural, educational, cultural, and linguistic issues. Elections took place at the end of July 2012, with the GJM sweeping all 45 seats unopposed.
From the outset, whether this would lead to a significant level of autonomy, even independence, or whether it was merely a placating move on the part of the government remained to be seen. The leader of the GJM, Bimal Gurung, continued to insist that the agreement was “only the preparation for the separate state of Gorkhaland.”16 While Chief Minister Banerjee categorically refused to consider this option, Gurung saw it happening within a year. When Gurung was sworn in as the president of the newly created Gorkha Territorial Administration (GTA) in August, he reiterated his push for independence. “I will not let it delay further,” he stressed. “In six months.”17
The relationship between Gurung’s GJM and Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress Party settled into an uneasy truce, even with the GJM rhetoric of “violence and bloodbath” if its demand for separated statehood was not met. While uncertainty dominated, 2013’s first and second flushes passed without major political incidents on the tea estates.
But then at the end of July 2013, as monsoon teas were being plucked and processed, India’s ruling Congress Party offered statehood to Telangana, in Andhra Pradesh. “They granted Telangana statehood, so why not Gorkhaland?” went the familiar cry. Gurung resigned as head of the GTA and called an indefinite bandh. A GJM supporter immolated himself. Tourists and students were asked to leave. Shops closed, roads emptied, and hotels shut. Schools canceled classes. Boarding students were sent home. Nothing could move. Vehicles on the road were burned. “There will be hardships but our movement will continue,” Gurung said.18
Again, tea estates were given an exemption. Yet this time they could not bring anything into the estates—food, fuel—nor take any tea out. Bushes need to be plucked; harvesting continued. Sacks of finished tea stacked up as stocks of coal, fuel, atta flour, and rice dwindled. Whenever a day’s relaxation in the bandh allowed people to restock basic necessities, convoys of trucks loaded with tea made their way down out of the hills as quickly as possible.
Finally, on September 10, 2013, after nearly six weeks, the bandh was suspended. Traffic returned to the roads. At the end of October, Chief Minister Banerjee arrived in the Darjeeling hills for a five-day visit. Gurung reversed his stance, met with her, and promised to call no more bandhs.
In the run-up to the 2014 Indian general election, Gurung took a new approach. The GJM switched its support to the Narendra Modi–led Bharatiya Janata Party’s parliamentary candidate for Darjeeling. After the BJP’s landside victory, Gurung was rewarded with an invitation to Modi’s swearing-in ceremony in Delhi at the end of May. When the West Bengal chief minister returned to the hills for a visit in July to help rekindle her relationship, Gurung gave her the cold shoulder.19 Their relationship had soured. The struggle for statehood continues, but now with a new ally.
During the 2013 monsoon season bandh, as tea piled up in Darjeeling factories and orders went unfilled, some buyers began sourcing their long-leaf orthodox teas for blending from other places. “This year with all of the problems [certain blenders] bought from Nepal,” said one planter.
While Sikkim’s lone tea estate, Temi, produces teas most similar in character to Darjeeling’s, the neighbor to the west—Nepal—is the biggest potential competition, even threat, as the recent crisis laid bare.
Winding through India’s Mirik Valley on the western flanks of the Darjeeling hills, past Chamong, Spring Valley, and Gopaldhara tea estates, and before cutting through Okayti and Thurbo, the road runs along the eastern India-Nepal border. On a foggy, drizzly July day, with mist hanging between the tall pine trees and upturned, white flowers shaped like old gramophone speakers along the weedy edge of the tarmac, messages from Vodafone India arrived on the mobile phone (“Hello, have a pleasant stay in Nepal”) followed by ones from NCELL, the local Nepalese carrier. Tea estates spread along both sides of the road.
Although the first saplings planted in Nepal were said to be a gift to the prime minister, Jung Bahadur Rana, from the Chinese emperor in 1842, the industry developed with stock, not to mention expertise, from Darjeeling. In 1982, King Birendra declared five eastern regions a “tea zone.” Ilam Tea Estate—the first commercial estate, planted out in 1863—remains the best. Overall, Nepal’s 142 estates produced about 18 million kilograms (40 million pounds) of tea in 2012, roughly twice as much as Darjeeling. But only 2.4 million kilograms of that—some 13 percent—is orthodox. The rest is CTC. While nearly all of the CTC is consumed in Nepal, 96 percent of the orthodox is exported.20
The quality of Nepalese tea has been improving in recent years and carries similar taste and aroma profiles. Buyers and tasters have taken notice. “It’s always in the back of the minds of producers,” said Anindyo Choudhury of Darjeeling’s growers after the 2013 season had ended, “that they will get into their market.” Since then there has been a sudden awakening to the likelihood of this soon happening, and the issue has moved to the front of their minds. They are suddenly seeing it as one of their biggest challenges.
German and other European blenders have already begun marketing a “Himalayan tea” made with Nepalese leaves21 that cost a third of what Darjeeling does. Perhaps of greater concern for Darjeeling gardens are domestic packeteers buying for the national market. They are looking for value for money. If the quality is there and the price is right, many are not that concerned about on which side of the border the tea was produced.
In the future, Nepal could be even more of a threat. In ten years, Nepal’s National Tea and Coffee Development Board expects to expand plantings significantly and produce 45 million kilograms (100 million pounds) of tea with 30 million kilograms of that Darjeeling-style orthodox, some fifteen times as much as is now produced.
Climate changes, labor problems, and severe political instability have all contributed to significant reductions in Darjeeling’s output. Darjeeling once produced 16 to 17 million kilograms (35 to 37 million pounds) of tea, and as recently as 1991 reached 14.5 million kilograms. The 2010 crop, hit by drought and then excessive rain, cutting the first flush by 25 percent, didn’t even reach 8 million kilograms, the lowest since the 1950s. The 2011 harvest edged back up slightly
with better conditions, but then 2012 got off to a terrible start, with droughtlike conditions and yields down a massive 40 percent. The 2013 harvest also began poorly. Tea bushes need three or four inches of rain between October and March. But no rain fell from the previous October until a sprinkling wetted the tea bushes in February, causing the first flush to be delayed. During April, the peak of the sought-after first flush, the harvest was down 24 percent from the previous year. The 2014 harvest began even worse. The lack of rain in the spring, with a more than two-month-long dry spell that lasted into May, pushed the first flush down 30 to 40 percent below 2013’s harvest. Some gardens lost even more, depending on the microclimate of the valley of the garden. “Gopaldhara [in the Mirik Valley] was down 33 percent, but Rohini [running up from the plains to Kurseong] was down 50 percent,” said Rishi Saria, “and that from last year, which wasn’t too good.”
First and second flush fetch good prices at auction. Together, they account for a third of the year’s crop but about half its revenue. The monsoon season contributes around 60 percent of the year’s total production, but much of this is sold below production costs. Autumn flush makes up the remainder.
That leaves little room for the kind of climatic unpredictability that stalks estates. In 2012, a hailstorm hit Marybong the first week of April and devastated its valuable first flush harvest. The same happened to Castleton in 2013, with a bruising of hailstones that knocked the quality of its highly coveted second flush.22
The heavy monsoons that drenched most of Darjeeling’s valleys during 2013 coupled with the summer political instability pushed down prices for the rainy-season teas by as much as 50 percent at J. Thomas & Co.’s auctions in Kolkata.23 Then the cold came early and the 2013 season wrapped up suddenly, quicker than expected. Most gardens missed their year-end targets.
