Factors Affecting Industrial Relations in Indian tea Industry: A Study on the North Bengal region of West Bengal

 

Nirmal Chandra Roy

Research Scholar, Dept. of Business Administration, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal

 

ABSTRACT:

The tea industry of north Bengal in West Bengal is unique on its character from the other tea producing regions in India. Tea is grown mainly in three regions in north Bengal — the Darjeeling hill region, the Terai region, and the Dooars. As per the latest report (2016-17) published by the Tea Board of India (TBI), north Bengal alone produced 358.53 million kg of made tea where total production of India is1250.49 m. kg . The north Bengal tea producing region comprises of 276 set tea estates and the economy of this region mainly depends directly or indirectly on tea industry.

Many tea estates located in the north Bengal region have failed to fulfill their statutory obligations of labor welfare as stipulated by the Plantation Act, 1951 creating fear psychosis in the mind of the workers. Labors have been started various kind of agitation and movement in order put pressure on the representative of management for securing those benefits those have prescribed by the Act. As a consequence, the labor-management relations which is properly known as industrial relations have been seriously affected. This deteriorating industrial relations have ultimately affected the moral of tea workers which in turn has affected the overall productivity as well as profitability of the industry.   

In this study an attempt has been made to identify the most significant factors which lead to the poor industrial relations in the tea industry of north Bengal. The required data has been gathered with the help of suitable questionnaire and the data has been analyzed with the help of the SPSS software. Further, based on the analyses a valid conclusions and recommendations have been made.

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION:

Tea, the ‘Green Gold’ is one of the cheapest and widely consumed beverage globe wide. As per the legendary, tea was introduced first in China accidentally by Emperor Shen Nong in 2737 B.C. In India tea was introduced by Robert Bush, a Scottish adventurer in 1823 in Assam. Since then tea industry have become one of the important driving forces of the Indian economy.

In India tea industry provides the second largest employment, 1.2 million just after the Indian Railway. India occupy the second position in the world as per the volume of production which is just after the China. During 2016-2017 India produced 1250.49 m. kg of tea.

 

North Bengal, the northern part of West Bengal is located in the Himalayan foothills covering the districts of Jalpaiguri, Coochbehar, Darjeeling, Dinajpure, Malda and the new born district Alipurduar of West Bengal. Tea is grown mainly in three regions in north Bengal — the Darjeeling hill region (in and around the Darjeeling sub-division), the Terai region (around the Siliguri sub-division), and the Dooars (covering Jalpaiguri and Alipureduar districts). North Bengal tea producing region composed of 276 organized tea estates. The economy of this tea producing region to some extend depends directly or indirectly on tea industry. A total number of 1, 86,559 families that composed of 11, 24, 907 population reside in tea estates of north Bengal. Including all around 2, 62,426 permanent workers engaged in tea estates of north Bengal.  Green Tea, CTC Tea and Orthodox Tea are the main three types of tea is being manufactured by the tea estates of north Bengal.

 

Due to the Globalization, tariff barrier has been withdrawn, meanwhile non-tariff barrier has been imposed by developed countries on the developing counties regarding the import of tea by charging Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP). It is costly to become a partner of Ethical Tea Partnership. As a result of this Indian tea industry has been in deep crises.  The present crises has crippled the socioeconomic structure of north Bengal tea producing region. The worker who have been dependent on the estate management for food, drinking water, housing, health and other facilities are the worse sufferer. Hundreds of worker have died due to starvation and malnutrition. The workers are losing their faith on the garden management and the incidents of strikes, gheraos, violence, etc. have increased significantly. In this background an attempted have made to explore the determinants of industrial relations in tea industry in India.

 

REVIEW OF THE EXISTING LITERATURE:

Several studies have been made of various aspects of Indian tea industry. Some of the major available research works have been referred below which are relevant to our present study.

 

Manharan (1974), analyses the problems of Indian tea industry based on production, consumption, export and share market after carefully observing the innovation of tea industry he observed that there had been considerable increase in exports of Indian Tea during 1950’s and India stood first in international tea export. Durig 1960’s India lost position as the largest exporter in the world to Sri Lanka. In his share market analyses, it has been found that low rate of profit, due to declining price and increasing cost of production, adversely affected the industry and the share value of tea companies had dumped considerably.

 

“Economies of Tea Industry in India” a study by RC Awasthi in 1975, highlights on the gamut problems in the tea industry and other problems like finance, supplies, transport, marketing, etc. One of the important chapters of it has discussed the matter related to labor and this study basically dealt with labor relations. The basic importance indicates of industrial relations have not been included in this study.

Sharit Bhowmik in his study on Class Formation in the Plantation System in 1981, attempt has made on class formation among tribal workers in West Bengal. In this study he has emphases on the migration of workers, method of labour recruitment, trade union activities and the social customs.  

 

Prasanneswari in 1984 of his remarkable study on Industrial Relation in Tea Plantations: The Dooars Scene, an attempt has made to describe the then present condition of labor relation in Dooars region of north Bengal. In the study he has identify two set factors namely, extraneous and intrinsic, inflation, political division of the affiliated parties of the workers regarding strikes and go-slow in the tea gardens, and labor legislations are factors under extraneous while the communication gap, and the increasing of population and unemployment in the tea gardens are under intrinsic factors.

 

Sib Ranjan Mishra on Tea Industry in India, 1986, has carried out a detail study of the tea industry located in West Bengal and its economy, the study further identified the multifarious problems and the current state of the industry.

 

Sharit Bhowmik in another study in 1992 on the Tea Plantation almost covers the all aspects of tea plantation in very brief manner. In this study he emphasis on the recent employment trend and unionization in the tea plantation and also shows high rate of casualiazation in one hand and on the other hand the trade union movement and the reason behind casualiziotion, stagnation in trade union movement.  

 

"Study of trade union organization among the tea workers in Terai and Dooars region" studied by Kanchan Sarkar in 1998 has discussed the trade union movement in Indian tea Industry based on different periods. Few chapters have discussed interestingly different issues relating to the socio-economic profile and so on.

 

Debasish Biswas (2011) "Productivity and Industrial Relations: An empirical study on tea estates in Dooars region of West Bengal" established that various factors of industrial relations have got tremendous impact on productivity and concluded that productivity is largely affected by the industrial relations and vice versa.

 

From the review of earlier literature it may be concluded that though there are so many pieces of literature available on Indian tea industry but they are lacking in certain respects. No researcher has shown any relevant factors which have very significant effect on industrial relations.

 

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY:

The review of literature has prompted me to frame the following objectives in the study. The focal objectives are listed below:

1.        To explore the determinants which have a profound influence on industrial relations in the tea industry of north Bengal region in West Bengal.

2.        To find out the degree of influence of the determinants on industrial relations in tea industry of north Bengal.

 

METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY:

This study involved use of both primary and secondary data. Analysis of the same would be done using statistical tools to draw appropriate conclusions and recommendations.

 

LOCATION OF THE STUDY:

The study area is tea growing regions of the north Bengal, those are popularly known as Terai, Dooars and Darjeeling.

 

Population:

There are 3,09,324 permanent and casual workers.

 

Sample Size:

Based on the Raosoft software for sample size determination, the required number sample is 384 at 95% confidence limit.

 

Sampling techniques:

Stratified random sampling.

 

Stratification variables:

Strata has been chosen based on the ownership pattern of the tea estates. So, based on that have determined mainly two strata namely, big corporate houses and sole proprietorship. 

 

Data:

The study is mainly based on the primary data, besides that secondary is also used.

 

Collection of Data:

Collection of primary data is mainly based on personal interview and personal observation.

 

Secondary Data:

Secondary data has been collected from various sources viz. Tea Board of India, various Tea Journals, Articles, DBITA, TBITA,TIPA, various publications of Tea Board of India, various reports published by the Department of Economics and Statistics, Department of Labor, Govt. of West Bengal, Newspapers, Magazines, Books, etc.

 

Identification of the variables:

From the existing literatures author have traced 17 variables that are closely related to the identifications of the industrial relations. These are as follows:

 

Wage, bonus, incentives, gratuity, retrenchments, unions, grievance, recruitment, promotion, drinking water, latrine, medical, canteen, crèches, education, housing and ration.

 

Scale Selection:

The investigation includes ‘measurement of attitude’ of the tea workers using 5-point Liker scale ranging from 1 to 5, where, 1 = ‘Strongly disagree’, 2 = ‘Disagree’, 3 = ‘Not agree nor disagree’, 4 = ‘Agree’, 5= ‘Strongly agree

 

DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION:

Cronbach’s alpha is designed as a measure of internal consistency; that whether all items within the instrument measure the same thing. Alpha is measured on the same scale as a Pearson r (correlation coefficient) and typically varies between 0 and 1. The closer the alpha is to 1.00, the greater the internal consistency of items in the instrument being assessed. In our study, the value of alpha is 0.904 which is highly desirable.

 

Table 1: Reliability Statistics

Cronbach's Alpha	N of Items
0.904	17

 

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) statistics, predicts if data are likely to factor well, based on correlation and partial correlation. There is a KMO statistic for each individual variable, and their sum is the KMO overall statistic. KMO varies from 0 to 1.0 and KMO overall should be 0.60 or higher to proceed with factor analysis. In our study, we got the KMO of 0.931 which is quite logical to proceed for factor analysis. The result is shown below:

 

Table 2: KMO and Bartlett’s Test

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy.	0.931
Sig.	<0.001

 

Through the result of factor analysis, we can explain the total variance and the proportionate variance of each factor in our study which is stated here:

 

Table 3: Total Variance Explained

 

From the above table 3, it is very clear to us that Management aspects explains 44.059% variance followed by Welfare aspects and Parental cares aspects. In the study, we have explained total 85.275% variance through the above stated components.

Table 4: Rotated Component Matrix

 

From the above rotated component matrix table, it appears that the variables which have formed three groups, i.e. factors based on the coefficient values. Based on that suitable name have assigned to the factors. In the case of factor 1 which comprises of nine variables Incentives, Promotion, Recruitment, Wages, Gratuity, Grievances, Unions, Bonus and Retrenchment all these variables a suitable name has been given as Management aspects. In the case of the factor 2 which comprises six variables which are Latrine and urinals, Drinking water, Medical, Crèches, Education and Canteens assigned the factor name as Welfare aspects. The last factor 3, which comprises two variables and these are Ration and Housing assigned the factor name as Parental cares aspects.

 

FINDINGS OF STUDY:

Though tea industry provides the largest employment opportunity in India, from the study we come to know the conditions of the workers and the labor-management relations which is not healthy at all. Several studies have been conducted by researchers on various aspects of the tea industry but none of them do not provide clear picture about the industrial relations scenario in particular. This study gives light on possible influence of industrial relations in Indian tea industry.

 

The study provides an empirical results which are based on the feedback of workers. A total of the seventeen variables those are closely related with the labor-management relations clubbed into three factors. The three factors; management aspects, welfare aspects and parental cares aspects have positive influences of the industrial relations.

 

The study further confirms that management aspects, welfare aspects and parental cares aspects are the strong determinants of industrial relations in Indian tea industry.

CONCLUSIONS:

The study on the determinants of industrial relations in tea industry has identified three important factors. The representatives of the management of tea estates should treat those identified factors properly that the balance of relations can be maintain and harmonious relations between management can sustain long in the tea industry in north Bengal region.  It is preferred that the apex institution, Tea Board of India, should initiate and guide to the garden authority to emphasis on the above stated findings. 

 

However, few important aspects which also have profound impact on determinations of industrial relations in the tea industry of north Bengal which has not covered by the study. The increasing awareness among the workers regarding their social and economic status, the ever-expanding army of unemployed among the tea garden laborers and the growth of education among the working class, etc. are such factors.

 

REFERENCES:

1.        Bhowmik, S. K. (1985). Industrial Relations in Tea Plantations, Economic and Political Weekly, 20, 217-218.

2.        Bhowmik, S. K. (2005). Tea Plantation Workers’ Strike, Economic and Political Weekly, 40, 38.

3.        Biswas D., Roy N. C. (2013). Problems and Prospects of Small tea Growers in India with special reference to North Bengal region. Advances in Management, 6, 27-34.

4.        Debabrata Mitra (2010). Globalization and Industrial Relation in Tea Plantation, New Delhi: Ahijit Publications.

5.        G. Banerjee, S. Banerjee (2009). Tea Industry in Transition, New Delhi: Ahijit Publications.

6.        Shakti Dutraj (2016). Tribals Issues and Challenges in the Closed Tea Garden of Dooars: A Case

7.        Study of Dheklapara Tea Garden. Journal of Global Resources, 2, 200-204.

8.        Tea Board of India, http//: WWW. Teaboard.gov.in (accessed date: February 2^nd, 2017).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Accepted on 18.04.2017          © A&V Publications all right reserved