Poverty and hunger can never cause deaths in Left-ruled Bengal. It is not easy to decide which one is more shocking — the unending deaths of workers and their family members in Jalpaiguri’s closed tea gardens or the state government’s shameless attempt to pass them off as ‘natural’ deaths. The poor and the hungry would naturally die if no succour is provided to them. It is also natural that they would suffer from malnutrition and diseases before they actually die. It is thus both absurd and revolting that the government sees nothing unnatural in the deaths. The official line reflects the cynical politics that surrounds such deaths in India. When farmers in other parts of the country are driven to death by debt or hunger, the Leftists are the most vocal of politicians about those ‘starvation deaths’. On their own turf, it is a different story — not even the poorest can starve to death. The danger in this approach is that it seeks to underplay the government’s failure to prevent these deaths. Worse still, such a callous government would do little to improve things at Jalpaiguri’s death zone.

Yet, only recently the government almost pleaded guilty over the deaths in north Bengal’s tea gardens. The picture that the governor, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, painted of the conditions there during a visit to a tea garden also led him to make a loud and strong condemnation of the State’s inaction. The number of deaths — 571 in 15 months — makes a cruel mockery of the promises that the finance minister, Asim Dasgupta, had made to the tea-workers sometime back. The most shocking aspect of the tragedy is the government’s blatant attempt to gloss over its failures. The government and political parties seem to know of just one use of the poor tea-garden workers, the majority of whom belong to tribal communities. They serve only as vote-banks.

However, short-term welfare measures may not be the answer to a problem that is essentially economic. For far too long, tea gardens have been run, not as business ventures, but almost as social security programmes. The techniques of production are outdated at most of the gardens. The owners have invested little towards modern production or managerial methods. To make matters worse, the industry has been burdened with social responsibilities that should have been with the government. True, the Centre and the state government have recently been forced to take note of the alarming situation at the tea gardens. The Union minister of state for commerce, Jairam Ramesh, has provided some ideas for reviving Bengal’s tea industry. But it is time New Delhi and Calcutta realized that the industry could no longer be run the way the British planters ran it. Hunger and deaths will continue to stalk the tea gardens until the industry reforms itself.