Health concerns of tea workers in India.

This paper explores the important question whether trade certifications alleviate the economic and social deprivations of workers in tea plantations in India. Following a critical assessment of the historic deprivations faced by tea plantation workers, the author reviews the potential implications of various certifications adopted by tea plantations in India, including, Fairtrade (FT), RFA, ETP and Trustea. As a case for empirical analysis, the paper specifically examines FT certification and its impacts on tea plantation workers with particular reference to three certified tea estates located in the Nilgiris region in Tamilnadu (South India) and Assam (North-East India). The analysis endorses many of the findings of earlier studies on Fairtrade certification. Yet, it also provides very useful additional insights in terms of explaining why the adoption of certifications, especially FT certification, by tea plantations does not yield the intended outcomes with respect to amelioration of the deprivations suffered by the plantation workers. It reveals that, despite more than two decades of engagement with FT certifications, tea plantations are unable to make significant improvements in the lot of the plantation workers due mainly to the fact that the FT premiums that the tea estates receive are nominal and quite variable across years. It concludes that, given that the domestic consumption demand for tea has been growing in India, it is also crucial to focus on the domestic market through the design and promotion of appropriate certification standards (integrating the finest elements of existing ones) that would contribute towards improving the status as well as working and living conditions of plantation workers. This would also help mitigate the huge disparity in wages and earnings of workers between the south and north Indian states that emerge from the study.

This article looks at the effectiveness of Fairtrade’s labour rights commitments through the lens of convention theory. It zooms in on workers involved in the cultivation, harvest, and processing of tea as Fairtrade’s single most important plantation product. Based on data generated in 2016 through a mixed methods study on the role of Fairtrade certification for tea plantation workers in India and Sri Lanka, we find a wide gulf between living wages and plantation workers’ actual earnings, as well as a separation between Fairtrade’s role and trade unions. This “test” of certification standards as a compromise between “civic” conventions concerned with equality and productivity-oriented “industry” conventions suggests that, in actual certification practice, industrial conventions reign.

In May 2009, nearly three decades of civil war in Sri Lanka came to an end with the Government of Sri Lanka’s defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Often eclipsed within representations of the country’s civil and political conflict, Malaiyaha or Hill Country Tamils, who primarily reside and work on Sri Lanka’s tea plantations, have experienced protracted forms of discrimination that directly result from social and economic matrices of escalating civil violence, legal and affective exclusion, and neoliberal policies of worker dispossession. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the immediate aftermath of war, this article focuses on Malaiyaha Tamils encounters with economic and bodily uncertainty in postwar Sri Lanka and their responses to hegemonic forms of knowledge about their heritage and present marginalization from Sri Lankan society. By presenting an ethnographic narrative of a cāmi pākkiratu (“consulting god”) healing ritual on a tea plantation, I argue that Malaiyaha Tamils, when intimately confronted with deficient realities that emerge from the more subtle effects of sustained dispossession on their community, cultivate modalities of expertise that destabilize the more dominant, subordinating perceptions about their worth and emplacement as minority workers in Sri Lanka. Such modalities suggest that building knowledge and competency within one’s conditions of dispossession cannot be understood as simple resistance or agency. Rather, such modalities of expertise complicate the redacted categories into which Malaiyaha Tamil plantation workers are persistently emplaced by affirming both new possibilities alongside the subtle militarization and persistent dispossession of minority workers in postwar Sri Lanka.

ABSTRACTThis study examines the interaction between social images and actual space in tenement houses, locally called line houses, on a tea plantation in Sri Lanka. The social image of line houses was analyzed based on the discourses of managers, supporters, and residents, while tracing the history of tea plantations and its social development. The physical characteristics and space of line houses were clarified following a field survey in a village, a former tea plantation in Kandy District. Line houses have been conventionally understood only in one aspect, as poor and inhuman living environments that need to be improved or eliminated. However, the results of this study show that the line houses have acquired a sense of place and inherited Tamil culture. This finding reinforces the recent discourse that attempts to reconsider the space of tea plantations from the perspective of the people who have lived there and may provide a basis for rethinking the government's policy of resettling people in line houses.

Tea plantation workers in India have historically been a part of the feminized workforce, constituting somewhat exceptionally formal labor in a country with high informalization of women's employment. In the past decade, however, a combined fallout of neo-liberalization and globalization contextualized within the local history of varying phases of incorporation, accumulation/dispossession and shifting relations of production brought about a crisis in the tea plantations leading to closures, retrenchment, and casualization. The women workers from tea plantations joined the burgeoning casualized urban labor force. Through ethnography and interviews I traced women workers from tea plantations in West Bengal, India, who migrated to the beauty industry in Hyderabad and Delhi-NCR. The paper focuses on the construction of women's labor in the beauty industry with continuities and contrasts from the tea plantations to understand the makings of gendered labor and skill. The women's frequent invocation of femininity as skill foregrounds the woman's body as central to woman's labor and the workplace but also provides a scope to unsettle understanding of femininity as a specific and naturalized concept. Using the lens of migration from one sector of feminized labor to another, this paper interrogates the production of the feminine worker and the workplace in different but related contexts. Their reflections on their work, skill, and workplace allows us an insight into the ways in which the body as the woman and the worker is deployed as skilled/natural and how they themselves co-construct, negotiate, and subvert the construction of femininity and feminine labor in the workplace.

This article analyses the impact of Fair Trade certification by focusing on its interactions with the patron–client relations traditionally established between management and workers in tea plantations in India. It argues that the invisibility of Fair Trade among workers, which generally reinforces existing patron–client relations through Fair Trade premiums, inversely hides the patronage of the management, and that workers are empowered when a premium is invested in a community development project led by an independent third‐party organisation.

This paper aims to highlight the precarity of plantation workers of Darjeeling, issues of inaccessibility to proper healthcare and inability to keep ill-health away. It draws from primary research carried out in two tea plantations of Darjeeling, West Bengal. Further, it also underlines the marginalized position of the women workers in the tea industry. Clinical factors are not the only cause of ill-health; rather there are social determinants of health such as means of livelihood, poverty, working conditions, accessibility, availability and affordability of and to basic services (housing, food security, water, sanitations, etc.) that play an important and definitive role. These in turn may influence the health choices of individuals while also leading to health inequalities.KeywordsLabourGenderDarjeelingTea plantationsHealth

The eradication of smallpox – the first and so far only human disease to be eradicated – generated a tremendous amount of excitement and attention to the idea of disease eradication and elimination. In the twentieth century alone, smallpox had claimed the lives of more than 300,000,000 people (Sneed A, Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/who-remember-smallpox/, 2014). The last natural case occurred in 1977, almost 200 years after the smallpox vaccine was discovered, and in 1979 the World Health Organization declared that the disease had been eradicated (WHO, Smallpox, World Health Organization. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/csr/disease/smallpox/en/, 2019c). Most importantly, it demonstrated that eradication was possible; that through the use of science, we could change our future for the better in ways that we had not even dared to think about previously. This achievement also helped to focus attention on clear definitions of disease eradication and elimination. Since then, these definitions have been continuously evolving. In 1993, the International Task Force for Disease Eradication (ITFDE I) defined disease control, elimination, and eradication. With that, they evaluated over 90 potential infectious disease candidates and concluded that six were eradicable. Subsequently in 1997, the Dahlem Workshop focused on the science of eradication and defined a range of public health approaches to infectious diseases from control, to elimination of disease, elimination of infections, eradication, and extinction. Three years later, the second International Task Force for Disease Eradication (ITFDE II) convened in 2000 to review the progress over the past decade.Inspired by these efforts, we reviewed our own experience and interviewed leaders of several disease eradication and elimination campaigns to identify lessons learned from a variety of disease elimination campaigns including smallpox, polio, Guinea worm, and onchocerciasis. Our aim was to identify lessons that might be applied to road traffic injuries. We identified 12 lessons from these infectious disease campaigns: (1) this is a cause and effect world; (2) know the truth; (3) coalitions are absolutely essential and absolutely hard; (4) avoid certainty (the Achilles heel of science); (5) measure frequently and build in continuous improvement; (6) respect the culture and work with the people you are trying to help; (7) the best decisions are based on the best science, but the best results, on the best management; (8) the best solutions move us closer to global health equity; (9) do not underestimate the time, resources, or tenacity it will take succeed; (10) eradication does not always require a vaccine or a cure; (11) start in the most difficult places first; and (12) you don’t begin at the end. These concepts from infectious disease campaigns have broader public health applications, and we discuss some of the implications for reducing road traffic injuries.

The objective of the paper is to highlight the growing ‘casualisation’ in the Indian labour market with special reference to the tea plantation industry in India and Darjeeling. The author begins by giving a background as to how casual labour/casualisation of labour emerged using the work of David Harvey on neoliberalism promoting free market and free trade as important features of any liberalised and globalised economy. The paper attempts to highlight some of the employment features of the plantation industry in India and highlight the vulnerabilities of the plantation workers. It was also felt necessary in this context of globalised world order to question the effectiveness of neoliberal and social justice driven international market mechanisms such as Fair trade on tea plantation workers of Darjeeling and whether international certifications ensure fairness to the workers engaged in the Darjeeling tea plantations.

Introduction: Musculoskeletal disorder (MSD) is one of the major occupational health problems worldwide. Musculoskeletal symptoms (MSS) can indicate an underlying MSD. This paper assesses the prevalence of MSS among different plantation workers in Kerala, India. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted from January to February 2021 among 83 rubber tappers, 90 cardamom plantation workers, and 87 tea pluckers (N=260). The Standardized Nordic Questionnaire (SNQ) was used to capture the MSS. MSS was compared across the three types of plantation workers, and the Chi-square test was used to test the significance. The Odds Ratios (OR) and 95% Confidence Intervals (CI) were estimated using binary logistic regression analysis. Results: The prevalence of MSS (any regions) in the last 12 months among all participants was 87.7% and did not significantly vary between the three groups of workers. In general, the most affected regions were the low back (61%), one or both knees (47%) and shoulders (44%), respectively. Compared to rubber tappers, the odds of MSS in hips/ thighs (adjusted OR=2.38: 95% CI: 1.17-4.84) and wrists (adjusted OR=3.77: 95% CI:1.85-7.69) were significantly high among cardamom plantation workers. But the odds of MSS in elbows (adjusted OR=0.58: 95% CI: 0.31-1.07) and knees (adjusted OR=0.26:95% CI: 0.10-0.63) were low in the tea plantation workers as compared to rubber tappers. Conclusion: Though there was no variation in the overall prevalence of MSS between the three groups, there was a significant variation between the groups regarding the MSS in different body regions. Using supportive aids according to the nature of work and doing simple stretching exercises during breaks may help to improve the musculoskeletal health of plantation workers.

Women contribute fifty percent of the total work force in tea plantation sector. The continuous use of chemical pesticides in plantation may increase the risk of exposure and can cause detrimental health effects. To assess the health status of women worker exposed to pesticides in tea plantation and to evaluate the pesticide levels in work environment. A cross sectional study was performed (n = 204) to assess the health complaints among exposed women workers (n = 116) and non-exposed women (n = 88) using a predesigned questionnaire. Work environmental air samples collected using PUF sampler and personal samplers were analyzed forvarious pesticides. Musculoskeletal disorder, skin color changes, allergies and asthma were the most commonly reported health complaints. Notably, only 16% of the women used personal protective equipment (PPE) while 68% reported to have experienced tea plantation work up to 6 month of their pregnancy period. Chlorpyrifos methyl (8.3%), carbendazim (6.7%), thiamethoxam (4.2%), ethion (4.2%) and thiophanate methyl (2.1%) were detected in work place air samples. This study is the first to characterize pesticide levels in work place of women workers in India. Women are continuously exposed to pesticides through their work and environmental exposure. Preventive measures are essential to mitigate the adverse health effects of pesticides among women workers.

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to determine musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) and to evaluate the ergonomic risks among the tea plantation workers in Bangladesh. Methods: A mixed methods design in form of cross-sectional study was carried out on a structured questionnaire and Novel Ergonomic Postural Assessment (NERPA) method at the Varaura Tea Estate. We used SPSS to analyze quantitative data, and the qualitative insight was gathered by means of an interviewing and a field observation For Review Only Results: A high prevalence rate of MSDs was detected especially in the lower back (62 percent), shoulders (49 percent), and knees (53 percent). NERPA analysis indicated that 63.3 percent of the assessed tasks had a need of immediate ergonomic treatment because of high postural risk scores. A significant relation was obtained between certain repetitive chores (e.g. plucking, load carrying) and reported annoyance (p < 0.05) Conclusions: The ergonomics risks involved in tea plantations in Bangladesh are troublesome. The ergonomic countermeasures need to be implemented specifically with interventions targeted at improving the health and productivity of workers through the workers training and 30 enforcement of the policies.

The tea plantation industry is a cornerstone of India’s rural economy, yet the socio-economic realities and quality of work life of its workforce remain underexplored. This study considers the difficulties encountered by the work of Tamil Nadu’s tea plantation, by focusing on socio -economic conditions, employment factors and their satisfaction levels. Using random samples of 300 workers, data collected through structured interview schedule and analyzed by anova and many regression techniques. The results showed a significant difference in the level of satisfaction according to age and education, income, job security and safety measures and health appear as important decisive factors of comedy. heart. The opportunity for career growth also positively affects satisfaction, while the organization culture shows a limited impact. The study emphasized the urgent need for fair salary, improving professional and transparent career development measures to improve the health of workers. These results provide information that can be used for manufacturers to plant and decide, in order to improve the sustainable and fair working environment for tea cultivation staff.

Editorial

The authors tested theories of housework among tea plantation workers in India, where women comprise the main part of the workforce and are breadwinners in their families. Analysis of 49 semistructured interviews and survey data from 3,181 female workers revealed that although women were mainly responsible for domestic labor, more than half of husbands usually or sometimes helped their wives with cooking, fuel wood collection, and child care. The analyses revealed a curvilinear relationship between husbands' earnings share and their participation in each task, supporting theories of bargaining and gender display. The probability of male participation decreased to its lowest level when men earned less than their wives. Husbands rarely helped with clothes washing-considered the most feminine task-and their participation did not respond to changes in relative earnings. These results support the authors' argument that patterns of bargaining and gender display will vary depending on the gendered nature of housework tasks within a particular society.