COVID-19 & Tea Estates in Assam

Assam is home to approximately 30 million people. Of these, nearly 1.3 million have received both doses of COVID vaccine till date, taking the percentage of the vaccinated to just under 4.5%. However, within the most marginalized and impoverished community in the state, this figure drops to a meagre 1%. This community is that of tea-garden workers toiling across 800-odd tea-estates.

In the current wave of COVID in Assam, this is the hardest hit segment. Between April and July, approximately 15,000 tea-garden workers tested positive for COVID-19. Categorized under the term “tea-tribes”, their tea-workforce amounts to 0.7 million. But including members who are non-working or employed elsewhere, the tea-tribe population totals a staggering 7 million, comprising 23% of the state’s total population.

While the dominant critique—in media and policy circles—has framed the high COVID-positivity and low vaccination-rate among tea-workers simply as an administrative and delivery problem, my own academic research in this field points at deeper, structural causes rooted in the peculiar history of the tea industry in Assam.

The tea-tribes are descendants of tribal and backward caste people transported (transplanted) by British colonial tea-planters to Assam from central-eastern India in the late nineteenth century to work as indentured labour on their huge estates, the plots for which were provided by the colonial state on tremendously favourable terms. The Assam Company, the world’s first-ever tea company, was founded in London in 1839. It is no coincidence that this happened barely a year after the formal annexation of Assam into the British empire in 1838.

The establishment of the tea industrial ecosystem in Assam was necessitated by geopolitical factors like the disruptions caused to the British tea market by conflicts with Imperial China over opium trade, which culminated in the Opium Wars. The labour-intensive nature of tea-cultivation coupled with the autocratic powers vested in the planter led to a peculiar structure of the Assam tea-estate which continues till date: it has functioned as a quasi-governmental bureaucratic unit in itself, performing multiple administrative and welfare functions generally expected of a sovereign welfare state.

In my M.A. thesis, tellingly titled "State within an Estate: A Political Economy Perspective on Tea Enterprise in Assam", I asked: In a postcolonial republic, where the welfarism of the welfare state applies to every citizen, why exists the anachronism of a “state within an estate”: an estate totally in charge of the lives (as opposed to livelihood) of the population inhabiting it?

This predominance of the estate poses significant challenges to effective governance, including (1) information deficit among workers because the official discourse seldom manages to infiltrate the walls of the estate. (For the workers, the planter or estate manager is their “sarkaar”!); and (2) passing of the buck by the state to the estate, as evidenced in recent orders issued by state bureaucrats to tea garden managements asking the latter to assume responsibility for workers’ health and welfare. This policy issue is especially relevant to the discourse on public-private partnership in the post-COVID era.