WOMEN’S LABOUR IN THE TEA SECTOR: Changing trajectories and emerging challenges

Abstract

The recognition of the changes within the Indian tea industry, one of the oldest industries in India is an important challenge while addressing the concerns of labour. It becomes all the more important to understand women’s agency of labour in the changing plantation landscape, when women constitute more than half of the workforce. Among others, the change that the paper highlights is the decline of work participation rate of women in the tea plantation sector. However, their labour as examined in three different spheres; that of as an estate worker, as a worker in a small tea garden and as a tea grower reflects that they are significant contributors to the industry as well as to their household. Situating this dynamics of women losing out in employment on the one hand and their increasing role in the industry and household on the other, this paper provides an account of their negotiations at multiple spheres of work and life. The paper through case studies establishes across various contexts that women have negotiated and emerged from the contours of power and authority and their own spaces at work and the household. The paper also attempts to understand the small tea grower sector in terms of their number, gender dynamics and more specifically the socio economics of women small growers cum workers, which have been a grey area hitherto. A significant proportion of tea growers are also workers; marginal in terms of land holdings coupled with inherent marginalities of caste, ethnicity and gender. This answers the question why there should be the need to incentivise and reorganise women’s labour for the industry. Measures beyond the rules and legislative frameworks, should address their marginalisation as visible through their inferior social indicators including literacy levels.