Role of Small Tea Planters in the Tea Industry with particular reference to Indian Scenario

Abstract

Tea is an important agro based industry in India employing directly at least one million people and giving indirect employment to another million persons. Indian scenario in this regard, is no different to the one in most of the other tea growing countries in the world. As a highly labor intensive industry, tea plantation provides employment for roughly seven hundredman days per hectare, which no other land based activity is able to generate. The labor employment in tea is at least seven to ten times more than that in the general agriculture and 12 to 15 timesmore than that in forestry.Women constitute almost 70%of the labor force on these plantations.