Sitting Ducks Post-COVID? Work Organisation and Compounded Health Risks for Darjeeling Tea Workers

Abstract

This article argues that burgeoning economic uncertainty, competitiveness of commodity production after COVID-19 and labour reforms may facilitate the industry to reorganise work arrangements through labour flexibilisation and mechanisation, accentuate health precarity, and nefariously push the disenfranchised Darjeeling tea labour further into oblivion. Workers’ access to basic healthcare services for illnesses and diseases such as fevers, diarrhoea, dysentery, anaemia, and hypertension pivots on the fragile lines of power and ethno-gender that are deeply embedded in plantation societies. Subsequently, social distancing as a preventive everyday measure during the pandemic appears to have reinforced both class and caste divide among these communities. The tangible absence of a robust health infrastructure in the Darjeeling hills exposes the undeniable shift in the responsibility of healthcare by the tea garden management on workers’ households and the samaj, as a social collective in managing illness and care.