towards a secure tomorrow

Siliguri, May 29: No more casual workers in tea gardens. All the existing ones must be made permanent.

This was one of the recommendations that the Centre for Women?s Studies of North Bengal University (NBU) will place at the three-day eastern region consultation to be held in Calcutta from June 15. The consultation is aimed at making the 11th Five-Year Plan more gender sensitive.

The meet, organised by the XIth Plan Consultative Committee, will comprise women activists, academics, members of NGOs and women?s study centres like the Women?s Resource and Advocacy Centre, Chandigarh. Its primary objective is to draw the attention of the Planning Commission to the specific requirements of women while drafting the five-year plan and allocating money under various heads.

?More than 60 per cent of the casual workers in tea plantations are women,? said director of the centre Sanchari Mukherjee.

?These workers have no social security and are not entitled to any facilities enjoyed by their permanent counterparts. Gradually, the managements are reducing the permanent workforce and replacing them with casual workers.?

?The women are greater sufferers, which is why we want all jobs in the tea gardens to be made permanent and the system of casual employment be stopped so that these workers, majority of whom are women, are not exploited in the name of the ongoing crisis in the industry,? she added.

The centre is in the process of drafting the proposals that will be put forth at the Calcutta consultation. A two-day workshop was held at the NBU on the topic from Saturday and representatives of different stakeholder groups took part in it. It was attended by members of the state women?s commission of Sikkim, NGOs and senior academicians like NBU vice-chancellor P.K. Saha, law-department head Gangotri Chakraborty and Jeta Sankriteyan, a member of the West Bengal state planning board.

Reservation of jobs for women in the formal sector and better health-care facilities for them in all spheres of work were some of the other issues discussed at the workshop, which had a total of around 50 participants.

?Like Sikkim, which has a pension scheme for women, we will propose similar schemes for women in other states,? Mukherjee said.

A 15-member delegation from north Bengal and Sikkim will participate at the Calcutta consultation. Similar consultation programmes are also being held in Bangalore, Guwahati, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad.

?The 11th Plan is being put together gradually and these consultations are being held to enable people from different walks of life, both within the government and outside, to participate in the formative process. There will be representation from the National Planning Commission and the State Finance Commission,? Mukherjee said.