All is not well with Assam’s Rs 2,000-crore tea industry. Irate over not getting their dues, labourers have lynched one more executive, an assistant manager in the Nandanban tea estate near Dibrugarh in Upper Assam. With this, the number of tea executives killed by their labourers in Assam has gone up to three in two weeks.‘‘It is a fact that the labourers are not getting what they are entitled for,’’ says Madhusudan Khandait, general secretary of the Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS), the apex body of Assam’s 20-lakh tea labourers. However, he condemns the violence that some of his fellow labourers have resorted to.In Sapoi, where two executives were lynched on May 30, labourers complained of not getting drinking water and electricity connections even after the management had signed an agreement with them in 1996 to fully electrify their quarters within five years.‘‘Sapoi is just one example of labourers being denied even basic facilities,’’ said Khandait who pointed out that services like health, primary education and sanitation are still unavailable in many gardens.Industry sources pointed out that as many as 23 incidents of labourers attacking managers and other executives have occurred in the state in the past year.
