Journal of Tea Science Research. 2015, Vol. 5, No. 5, 1-8
4
Fig
ure
3 Monthly income per family
Fig
ure
4 Housing Structure
3.6 Housing Structure
It was observed that people in the study area usually
made their house using tin, sun grass/bamboo and
mud. Most of the houses were built with mud (53%)
while few houses are made of sun grass and bamboo
(18%).
3.7 Electricity facility
The electricity facility in our tea garden is not good.
People of higher authority get the benefit of electricity
but the tea worker hardly gets this chance. Tea garden
with town areas is enjoying the facility of electricity.
Contrary to the national average of 31.5% of the
households using electricity (BBS, 2003) only 13.4%
of the tea garden households and 14.5% in ethnic
minority community had electricity supply (Nath et al.,
2005). In our study we show 71% household have no
electricity where 29% have them.
3.8 Safe water used by Tea workers
Hand pumps are the most common source of water
supply in the Tea Garden. Notably, one hand pump is
provided for 4 to 5 families at an average (Saikia et al.,
2013), which is a much higher ratio compared to the
norms followed by the water supply programmes of
the Government of Bangladesh. However, mostly
shallow hand pumps are used in the Tea garden. In our
study we saw that tea workers are not well aware of
using safe water. Few of them use tubewell water
while most of them used water supply founding them
nearby.
3.9 Sanitation condition in tea gardens workers
Regarding the condition of toilets, it is unfortunate
that a substantial part of the people under the study
use open space as toilets which is very unhealthy and
prone to various sanitation related diseases. It is clear
from the fig. that as much as 55% households are
using open space toilets. Sanitary toilet is
comparatively low (30%) tea estate. Which is similar
to study conducted by Chowdhury et al.
,
2011. But in
the study it has been found that most of the sanitary
toilets provided by govt. and Tea Company are in
damaged situation due to improper construction and ill
management.
3.10 Land Holding Pattern
The size of land holding by the respondent determines
their status and economic position. The average size
of land holding varied from 0.1 to 4 square yard. Most
of the respondent in the study owned land below 2
square yard. The holding range 2-3 square yard was
owned by 37% of the total samples.
3.11 Trade union membership
There is a trade union in this garden. But this is just
defective. As they said to us that “the trade union is
an organization that is existing only by name”. We
find only a few respondents who are the member of
trade union. In spite of the slow activities of the trade
union, some people are seemed to be satisfactory by
the activity of the trade union. But the most people are
not satisfied on trade union activities. Most of the
people said that, “the trade union activities are unseen
and they take bribe from the authority for closing the
movement” which was there duty for the betterment of
tea gardeners. Recently they were active when salary
increases. They want to increase trade union activities
and reject bribe which is given from authority. Yet
most of the people glad for that, their salary increase
by the movement of trade union.
(Figure 5-10).
