This report by ASSOCHAM (an umbrella organisation for chambers of commerce and trade associations in India) addresses the North India bulk tea industry. It provides information on production, exports and imports across the global tea industry and discusses production, exports, domestic demand and auction prices for the bulk tea industry in North India. ASSOCHAM identifies challenges which the North India bulk tea industry faces and sets out a proposed way forwards to address those challenges.

Details of tea company policies are provided in this Business & Human Rights Resource Centre database, the result of a survey of 65 companies, asking them about their human rights policies and standards - 25 responded. (See also the Wikirate Tea Transparency Tracker which provides details of the suppliers of companies who responded to the survey).

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre approached 65 companies with a request for them to disclose the estates and bought-leaf factories that they source their tea from, to be held centrally in the first Tea Transparency Tracker. There are over 3100 estates and factories linked to 20 companies within the Tracker, and all disclosed supplier data is available under a Creative Commons licence via WikiRate.

The IUF reports that “workers and their families on tea estates in India owned and operated by Amalgamated Plantation Private Limited that supplies Tetley tea have limited access to potable drinking water and adequate sanitation facilities… workers, especially women workers, have formed committees in each plantation. For the past 2 years the committees have held meetings to educate workers on the human right to water and sanitation. Through consultation with workers they have formulated a concrete plan to put to the management and collectively negotiate solutions.” It calls on Tetley: “1. To recognize their responsibility and act to ensure that all tea plantation workers in their supply chain can effectively access their right to water and sanitation, and 2. To guarantee that the plantation management engages with the water and sanitation teams in good faith to resolve the human rights violations.”

In this nuanced ethnography, Sarah Besky narrates the lives of tea workers in Darjeeling. She explores how notions of fairness, value, and justice shifted with the rise of fair-trade practices and postcolonial separatist politics in the region. This is the first book to explore how fair-trade operates in the context of large-scale plantations. Readers in a variety of disciplines—anthropology, sociology, geography, environmental studies, and food studies—will gain a critical perspective on how plantation life is changing as Darjeeling struggles to reinvent its signature commodity for twenty-first-century consumers.

Evidence gathered by researchers working for Traidcraft Exchange found that on estates that are believed to supply UK tea companies: A culture of surveillance and control by management goes unchecked; Wages – agreed across the Assam tea sector – are below Assam and Indian minimum wage levels; Housing is often leaky and in a state of disrepair; Sanitation is minimal or non-existent with open defaecation the norm when working; Local health facilities often lack medicines and staff and better ones are far away; Food rations are insufficient and of poor quality… As a first step [Traidcraft suggested] the big UK brands should be transparent about which estates they buy from.

This study of the estate sector carried out by the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) during 2005, sought to inform the World Bank’s Sri Lanka Poverty Assessment (SLPA) and its global study on ‘Moving out of Poverty: Understanding Growth and Freedom from the Bottom Up’ (MOP). The SLPA’s1 focus was drawn to the estate sector because the national poverty statistics released by the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) highlighted an increase in the head count index of poverty in the estates over the last 15 years, in contrast to a national trend of gradually reducing poverty. The CEPA study has two core research questions: • Why has the estate sector shown increasing levels of poverty? • Why and how do some poor people move out of poverty and stay out of poverty, while others fall into poverty or remain trapped in chronic poverty?

This report shares the findings of the Tea 2030 project. It provides insights into the potential future of the global industry, presenting different scenarios on what the tea sector might look like in 2030, as well as a series of recommendations as to how the sector might collaborate and respond. Tea 2030 is a project bringing together some of the most influential organisations in the global tea industry, including the Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP), Fairtrade International, Finlays, IDH - the Sustainable Trade Initiative, Rainforest Alliance, S&D Coffee & Tea, Tata Global Beverages, Twining, Uniliver, and Yorkshire Tea. Facilitated and managed by Forum for the Future.

The two-year Global Business of Forced Labour study investigated the business models of forced labour in global tea and cocoa supply chains. Forced labour is work brought about by physical, psychological or economic coercion. Extensive on-the-ground research with the cocoa industry in Ghana and the tea industry in India revealed agricultural workers are paid severely low wages and are routinely subjected to multiple forms of exploitation. The project involved in-depth interviews with more than 120 tea and cocoa workers, a survey of over 1,000 tea and cocoa workers from 22 tea plantations in India and 74 cocoa communities in Ghana, and over 100 interviews with business and government actors.

The report is based on three years of research and visits to 17 out of 24 plantations and describes pervasive violations of workers’ rights on the plantations owned by Amalgamated Plantations Private Ltd. (APPL) in the states of Assam and West Bengal, in India… The report assesses the claims of the workers against the standards of the Plantations Labour Act (PLA), India’s post-independence law that regulates working conditions on plantations and requires plantation owners to supplement meager wages with adequate housing, health care, and food rations, in addition to ensuring adequate water and sanitation. The report documents failings on all fronts.