Blair P. Houghton wrote:
Don't blame or punish the workers. When you see proprietors offering
to cut pay 50% and fire large chunks of the workforce in any business
with well-developed labor division, you're looking at lazy proprietors

Exactly. Just let me add that now with the first flush coming up
smaller farmers sell their plucked green leaves for an average 20-25
Rupies/kg (~30-65 US cent) to the larger estates where they are
manufactured and finally sold as "single estate" tea. Now guess what
the workers see of that money. It's usually around 1 US$ and less for a
full working day and of course only during the plucking seasons. Some
of the gardens (Makhaibari) provide school education and medical care
for their workers and families but the majority of the workers don't
see too much of that. I'm not even mentioning the issue of pesticides
and their related health hazards here. You'd really have to visit one
of those villages next to the estates and see the poverty and pesticide
related health hazards among the workers and their families to believe
it.
One more excerpt from Baburam Dewan's suicide note:
"What kind of justice is this that a single man can push 6500 men to
the brink of starvation?",
Note that he was just mentioning one of 83 estates in Darjeeling with a
total workforce of about 50000 people.

As Dieter mentioned before this kind of justice is supported by a
market - greedy proprietors, brokers and vendors and finally
uncritical, "stupid" customers - who mostly don't give a xxx on the
backgrounds of the stuff they're consuming.

Back to the lazy (or whatever) proprietors let me mention just one
example (out of many): the "Happy Valley" estate, right below
Darjeeling Bazaar. A beautiful garden with wonderful plants, own
factory and optimal road connections. Their tea ? Just another sad
story from the "queen of hills" ... to be continued.

Karsten / Darjeeling