WEST BENGAL, INDIA—Tea is sipped every day by billions of people.

Much of it comes from India, which provides 14 per cent of world tea exports and employs 3.5 million people in the industry — almost the entire population of Alberta.

India’s tea reaches every corner of the planet, packed inside the cheap, instant tea bags found on supermarket shelves as well as in the classy wooden boxes of Darjeeling, the world’s most expensive tea.

But 68 years after India became independent, its tea garden workers still live under the remnants of an indentured labour system established by British colonialists in the mid-19th century.

Most of the workers are women employed as pluckers, often the direct descendants of the bonded labourers brought into the gardens more than a century ago. Their living conditions mirror those of their predecessors.

Hosted in isolated colonies lost amid the country’s 1,500 plantations, workers earn less than $2 U.S. per day and depend upon tea companies for everything, from food and water to health facilities, schools and electricity. They inhabit houses owned by the companies, and they can be expelled from the estates if another family member doesn’t take over picking responsibilities when the older generation retires.

With its endless rows of trimmed, dark green bushes, tea estates exude an air of peace. Women work silently, plucking the upper, golden green leaves and placing them in net bags hanging from their heads. Managers dress in Bermuda shorts in homage to British traditions, their whitewashed residences completing the postcard-like look of an idyll.

Yet, a few hundred metres from their offices and the adjoining processing factories stands the truth of a sometimes pitiless industry.

Decrepit houses with no toilets line the colonies’ unpaved roads. Schools are staffed with one or two teachers for hundreds of pupils, with children ferried like cattle in the same trailers used to transport tea leaves. Hospitals are often nothing more than a couple of stinking, dirty wards equipped with a few wooden beds and a dispensary whose shelves are empty.

“There are so many tears behind the tea we drink every day,” says Victor Basu, the leader of Dooars Jagron, an association assisting tea workers in the eastern India’s state of West Bengal, one of the country’s main tea-producing area.

Home to 276 tea estates split among the regions of Terai, Dooars and Darjeeling, the state is infamous for poor working conditions. Here, a 2013 government survey found that only 61 estates had proper drinking water, 107 didn’t have hospitals and 44 had no latrines, all services that tea companies are obliged to provide by law.

Almost 96,000 out of 262,000 workers had not been provided housing, while 35 tea estates were behind on wages and 41 had not deposited any funds for their workers’ retirement. Several other workers were classified as “sick,” or struggling financially.

“Tea workers in West Bengal are deprived of the minimum of the minimum,” says Abhijit Mazumdar, president of the Terai Struggling Tea Workers Union. “They are kept in this condition on purpose, in order to provide the industry with cheap labour.”

But for many pickers, the only thing worse than working on the plantations is not working on the plantations. If tea companies default, their gardens can close overnight, leaving workers with no wages, water or food, literally starving to death. According to local NGOs, more than 2,000 tea workers have died of malnutrition in the past 15 years.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, India’s tea sector has been ravaged by cyclical crises caused by underinvestment, international competition and poor management. Some estates have not invested in planting new tea bushes for more than 100 years, causing yields to plummet.

In the mid 2000s, when the industry experienced its worst crisis, 14 tea gardens closed. Seven are still shut, affecting 5,000 workers and their families, a total of 25,000 people.

Although the government has recently stepped in, providing closed estates’ workers with food, water and basic health services, reopening the gardens would mean uprooting entire sections of old, unproductive tea bushes and replacing them with new plants, a costly proposition that scares off most potential investors.

Meanwhile, workers cannot afford to move elsewhere and start a new life. They have no savings and migrating would mean losing their right to the house and the job if gardens reopen.

While waiting hopelessly, many fall prey to human traffickers who swarm the closed gardens, luring youngsters to other parts of India with false promises of good jobs and money.

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Meet five people from the tea gardens:

The plucker: A cycle of poverty

At noon, when the siren signalling the end of the morning shift blows through the Mogulkata Tea Estate, 45-year-old Mina Sharma collects her umbrella and flip-flops and joins an endless queue of sweating, ragged women waiting for their tea leaves to be weighed.

In front of them, dressed in sleek, impeccable shirts and shorts, two male managers check the weight and scribble the number of collected kilos on small pieces of paper, handing them to the pluckers.

As soon as she dumps her load into the trailer, Sharma rushes home to cook a meagre vegetable lunch, the only thing her paltry wage can afford. In 90 minutes, when the siren will blow again, Sharma will return to pluck the rest of the 25 kilograms of leaves she is tasked with for the day.

“My life is a constant rush,” she explains, eating hurriedly. A single mother of one, Sharma started working as a plucker when she was 30, taking over her mother’s job. Born and bred in Pakka Line, one of the several villages dotting Mogulkata, Sharma lives with her parents in the rundown house provided by the tea company more than 50 years ago. “They never mended it,” she says bitterly, looking at the rusted roof. “Every time it rains, we have to use umbrellas inside.”

The dwelling has no toilet or running water. The only water tap in the area serves 500 people.

Caught between the desire of a better future for her loved ones and the fear of losing the few certainties she has, Sharma hopes her 25-year-old daughter will replace her in the fields one day.

After decades of sacrifices and a life completely devoted to tea harvesting, her only reward would then be to keep on living in the leaky house that hosts all her memories, but that she will never be able to truly call hers.

The manager: Building a community

A few dozen kilometres from the plains of the Dooars sit the green, misty hills of Darjeeling, home to one of the most prized teas in the world. Darjeeling is known as the “Champagne of teas.”

Among the most famous Darjeeling brands is Makaibari, whose tea estate sits on a hilly ridge near the village of Kurseong. Last year, Makaibari tea sold at a record price of $1,850 (U.S.) per kilogram.

Headed by the flamboyant and energetic Rajah Banerjee, Makaibari has long made quality its priority. The tea estate, which was the first in the world to be certified organic in 1988, is renowned for its holistic approach to tea cultivation and preservation of the surrounding rainforest.

Moreover, Makaibari prides itself for having created a harmonious environment between the management and its workers, thanks to a series of social initiatives aimed at empowering women and local communities. Among them are the employment of women as field supervisors, the provision of scholarships, libraries and community centres, and village homestays that allow some local families to earn money by hosting tourists visiting the estate.

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From its wooden office, whose walls are covered with travel articles about the estate, Banerjees likes to say those employed at Makaibari “are not workers, but community members.”

Workers at Makaibari appear to be better fed and clothed than their colleagues in the Dooars. But just a few hundred metres from the main road where most of Makaibari social initiatives are concentrated, in the nearby village of Thapathali, a group of pluckers agree to talk about their living conditions if their identities will be kept secret for fear of repercussions.

“From the outside, Makaibari looks very nice, but it’s only us who know how we are surviving here,” says one, a 40-year-old woman. She says the houses are not being renovated and payments have at times been irregular. Moreover, Thapathali lacks a proper road and there are no water pipes to connect it to the closest spring, three kilometres away.

The trafficked girl: A childhood stolen

“I like to study,” says Bijita Ekka, 15. “I always wanted to be a teacher.”

Born in the Bundapani Tea Estate in Dooars, where her parents were employed as permanent workers, Bijita was raised in a simple mud-and-straw house with her 14-year-old sister.

“Life was very good; I had everything I wanted,” she remembers fondly. But when Bundapani closed in July 2013, Bijita’s fate changed radically.

After the closure, the 1,215 Bundapani workers kept plucking for few months, selling the leaves to middlemen at a discounted price. But the lack of nursing and fertilizers soon affected the quality of tea, forcing them to stop.

A promising student, Bijita had to drop out of school and join her mother in stone-crushing. Their meagre earnings could not sustain the family, so when an agent promised good jobs as domestic workers, Bijita and her mother left for Delhi.

Once there, the girl was immediately separated from her mother and taken to a different house. The agent raped her for days. Bijita was then brought to the city of Chandigarh to serve as a domestic helper.

“Husband and wife used to beat me if I made any mistake,” she remembers. “When they were out I was locked inside the house, so that I could not escape.”

Bijita was able to return home one year later, after her mother had repeatedly threatened the agent with calling police. The family didn’t receive a penny for Bijita’s work; her wages were paid directly to the agent.

According to a local social worker, since the garden closure there have been more than 300 human trafficking cases in Bundapani, with one-third still unresolved.

“If the tea garden had been open I would have never left,” says Bijita.

The student: Seeking a future

In order to make ends meet, several families within the tea estates have at least one member, generally a male, working abroad or in big cities like Delhi or Mumbai.

Chandan Chetri, 24, was born and bred in the Mogulkata estate, where his mother works as a plucker. But he is adamant he will soon leave.

“If I find a job elsewhere, it will be paid at least the double,” he explains, sitting in his family’s tidy living room. “I want to go out of here, anywhere possible.”

Chetri, who is in his first year of a bachelor of arts program in Birpara, 50 kilometres away, hopes to follow in the steps of his father and elder brother, who are working in a steel factory in Hyderabad and a food supply company in Kerala, respectively.

“Everything is bad here, from education to health.”

The stonecrushers: Surviving

Lost amid the sea of white, bright stones filling the Diana riverbed, Shoma and Sugi Munda let their hammers fall rhythmically on the stones they have collected.

Just a few hundred metres away sits the lush Red Bank Tea Estate, where the pair has worked since 1969. When the estate closed in October 2013, leaving behind just a notice on the bulletin board, its 888 workers and families were left with nothing.

The Mundas, like their former colleagues, are surviving on emergency rations provided by the government.

During the dry season, they crush stones for the local construction industry, earning $3.75 U.S. per day for 12 working hours.

“Before, the (tea) company was providing everything: rations, clothes, medicines ... Now we have to buy all by ourselves,” says Shoma, 56.

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