Guwahati. A recent report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) said that wages of workers working in Assam’s tea gardens are “low” and there are “many deficiencies” in the implementation of labour laws and worker welfare provisions. CAG also found the state government’s intervention in ensuring wages as per the Minimum Wages Act (MW Act) “inadequate” and said that efforts to improve the lives of workers have “failed” to bring any concrete change.
The audit of ‘Implementation of schemes for welfare of tribal workers in tea gardens’ for the period 2015-16 to 2020-21 said that low income and lack of education are the major obstacles to the overall development of workers in the state.
The audit was conducted in four areas – Cachar, Dibrugarh, Nagaon and Sonitpur. There are 390 tea estates in the four sample areas, out of which 40 estates (10 per cent) were selected on the basis of their size and number of workers employed. Apart from reviewing the records, 590 workers employed in the selected estates were interviewed.
The report said that the Tea Tribes Welfare Department (TTWD) tried to resolve the issues of the workers, but it was done without basic socio-economic data and their initiatives were implemented in a “haphazard manner”. “The wages paid to workers in tea gardens are very low,” the report said. The report also pointed out that the Assam government has not fixed the minimum wage as per the Tea Plantation Act, 1948.
It also said that these workers are not part of the scheduled employment notified by the state government, as a result of which they do not get the benefit of minimum wage standards and variable dearness allowance. The Secretary of the Department of Labor and Welfare told CAG that when the state government took the initiative to increase wages as per the Minimum Wages (MW) Act, it was challenged in the court and hence the expected increase in wages could not be made.
The report also highlighted the wage disparity between workers from the Barak and Brahmaputra Valleys and said the labour department “could not give any reasonable reason” for it. It said workers from the Barak Valley were getting “at least 10 per cent less” wage rates than workers from the Brahmaputra Valley and the government had taken no steps to address the issue.
The report said that as per the wage rates of 2019, workers employed in tea gardens of Assam are being paid the lowest wages as compared to other tea producing states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and West Bengal. It said that although wages to tea workers in Assam are paid partly in cash and partly in the form of goods and services, there is no record of any authorisation given by the government for such a system.
The report said that the Labor Department is also not aware of the year in which this system of payment in the form of goods and services started. It said that the list of goods eligible for payment in the form of goods and services has neither been determined by the government nor is there a system to calculate the cost of these goods. According to the report, payment of wages in cash or in the form of goods and services is not in accordance with the provisions of the MW Act. The CAG report also said that the Assam Tea Employees Labor Welfare Board did not carry out any mandatory welfare activities and 85 percent of the expenses incurred for it during 2015-20 were related to administrative expenses.