Over the recent months, however, the industry is not just failing to attract private investment, but has come to a grinding halt - basically due to the festering standoff among the farmers, businesspersons and the wage earners over pay.
Every year, tea farmers and wage laborers take to the streets, charging the entrepreneurs with compelling them to sell the tealeaves they collect for a paltry sum. And then the laborers are angry with both the farmers and the entrepreneurs for allegedly forcing them to work for low wages. [break]
And to make the situation worse, pests and diseases have been affecting the tea plants over the recent years.
The tea farmers in the district, who have spent the best part of their life in the tea estates, are lately turning to other enterprises.
“The businessmen are paying us so low that it is very difficult for us to recover the capital invested in the farm,” says Aash Bahadur Tamang, who is planning to plant fruit trees and other herbs in his tea estate spread over two bigahas of land in Haldibari.
“On top of that,” he adds, “the tea plants are destroyed by unidentifiable diseases and there is the dearth of laborers. I am fed up with the business and really want to get rid of this headache.”
After the government started providing a loan on a low interest rate for those willing to start tea farming, many farmers had turned their land into tea estates. According to government records, tea farming is still being carried out in some 16,700 hectares of land in the district.
For almost three months now, the wage earners in various tea estates in the district are staging protests, demanding pay hike and other social security facilities. But tea businessman and farmers are reluctant to address the demand. The stakeholders have held over a dozen meetings to find an amicable solution, but to no avail.
Due to the protest, the tea industry of the district has now come to a grinding halt.
On August 19, the agitating wage earners submitted a memorandum to the District Administration Office to push their demands.
“If our demands are not met by August 29, we will launch street protests” said Bhakta Bahadur Biswokarma, vice-president of Nepal Chiya Bagan Shramik Sangh.
According to Biswokarma, there are over 30 thousand wage earners in the district. “The present number of laborers affiliated with tea farming is just half of the total number of laborers used to work in the past. Due to lower wages, many workers have changed their profession,” says he.
“Due to the dearth of manpower and constant protest, no one is lately willing to invest in tea farming. The government´s failure to determine a fix price for tealeaves and to set agreeable wage rates for workers has been worsening the situation,” says Ramesh Poudel, president of Nepal Tea Production Organization.
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