Emerging Micro-Politics of the Marginal Tea Plantation Community of West Bengal in the Context of Globalisation and State's Neo-Liberal Policies

Globalisation ushered in the new economic reforms in India during 1990s through government's new market policy. But, in the wake of these globalised economic orientations, the impact of State-led neo-liberal policies was also strongly felt. And just when the global discourse on democracy became uni-dimensional, almost thrusting the neoliberal model of market democracy as the only universally desirable model and Indian State linking itself to the global economic and political power, significant countervailing processes emerged in the form of socio-political movements at the grass root level, thereby countering the State's policies of globalisation. The study conducted in North Bengal among the marginal tea plantation community attempts to study the emergence of Adivasi Vikas Parishad (AVP) as a political force in Terai and Dooars tea regions at the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas. Responses are built primarily on the lived experience of economic marginalisation of tea workers, revealing contradictions between accumulation of profit by garden-owning companies with global market connections on the one hand, and the increasing living costs, failure of State policies to support for the sustainable livelihoods of the workers and the pressures emanating from the newer orientations of life for the hitherto unexposed people through globalisation, on the other. In the light of this, the present paper attempts to evaluate the State-sponsored neo-liberal economic policies and their impact on the livelihoods of the tea workers, and the resultant micro-politics of tea workers’ livelihoods, albeit with a focus on the possible future trends and their overall implications to the nature of economic policies and politics in the region.