Plantation Precarities: Life and Labour in the Tea Industry of Assam

The paper seeks to understand how precarity comes to structure life and labour within Tea plantations of Assam. Plantations in Assam much like the rest of the world were built on complex processes of exploitation and dispossession of land and labour. An extension of colonial relations of servitude and the agro-industrial complex comes to structure the production relation of plantations in northeast India. A ‘web of crisis’ stemming from the global market economy of tea and capital relations in the 21st century penetrates the economic and social reality of those who continue to live and labour in it. Communities who continue to reside within the plantations live in uncertainty with families working within and beyond the expanse of the plantation. The production relations within plantation economies through a slow and staggered process have restructed itself to produce precarious lives. Workers continue to live within exploitative and oppressive conditions where the structure of wage relations, housing and health intersect to produce a precarious existence which keeps them bound to the plantation.

The paper attempts to unpack the socio-economic and political landscape of the plantation system to understand how precarity is rendered as the governing edifice of plantation life. The material reality and relations to the production process are engaged with through the everyday engagement of workers with the plantation management to understand how a precarious life is created.

The paper also attempts to unravel what the production of precarity as a condition of plantation life means for the plantations as an agro-industry. Through a lens of precarity and uncertainty produced by the nexus of wage relations, a system of payment in kind, housing and health experiences the paper attempts to examine the plantation as a system which has for over a century produced the ‘world’s cup of tea’.