socioeconomic study of Darjeeling tea workers Research Papers (original) (raw)

Forest cover in hilly regions is essential to maintain environmental, economic and ecological balances. The production, conservation and sustainability of forest resources are constantly threatened by inappropriate anthropogenic intervention and exploitation. This study was conducted in 2019 to discover the sustainable management of forest resources and rural livelihoods in the Darjeeling Hills. The study results also indicate that little attention has been paid to the cultural, traditional and environmental value of forest resources in Darjeeling Hills. Even awareness programs on the use and conservation of forest resources by various government and non-governmental organizations are limited in the study area. Current forest management strategies suggest that forest resources are common resources, resulting in the lack of active participation of rural households in forest conservation practices.

Critical scholarship on geographical indications (GIs) has increasingly focused upon their role in fostering development in the Global South. Recent work has drawn welcome attention to issues of governance and sparked new debates about the role of the state in GI regulation. We argue that this new emphasis needs to be coupled with a greater focus upon local social relations of power and interlinked issues of social justice. Rather than see GI regimes as apolitical technical administrative frameworks, we argue that they govern emerging public goods that should be forged to redress extant forms of social inequality and foster the inclusion of marginalized actors in commodity value chains. In many areas of the world, this will entail close attention to the historical specificities of colonial labor relations and their neocolonial legacies, which have entrenched conditions of racialized and gendered dispossession, particularly in plantation economies. Using examples from South Africa and South Asia, we illustrate how GIs conventionally reify territories in a fashion that obscures and/or naturalizes exploitative conditions of labor and unequal access to land based resources, which are legacies of historical disenfranchisement. Like other forms of neoliberal governmentality that support private governance for public ends, however, GIs might be shaped to support new forms of social justice. We show how issues of labor and place-based livelihoods increasingly influence new policy directions within Fair Trade agendas while concerns with " decolonizing " agricultural governance now animate certification initiatives emerging from new social movements. Both initiatives provide models for shaping the governance and regulation of GIs in projects of rural territorial development that encompass principles of rights-based development to further social movements for rural social justice.

- by S. Ali Malik
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- Intellectual Property, Race and Ethnicity, Rural Development, Gender and Development
- by Vimal Khawas
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- socioeconomic study of Darjeeling tea workers, Darjeeling

Dr. Debarati Sen Fair Trade, a market based social justice movement, aims to empower marginalized producers through creating sustainable trade-links between reflexive Western consumers, activists, and Southern producers. What remains unexplored within this abstract global discourse on Fair Trade is how subjects of justice, in this case women tea farmers in rural Darjeeling, understand and mobilize around the governance practices of Fair Trade in light of their specific community-based struggles over resources and identity. Through an ethnography of Fair Trade operations and their effects on a small-farmers' tea cooperative in Darjeeling, I contend that Fair Trade interventions can inadvertently strengthen patriarchal/gendered power relations in producer communities, but that women tea farmers also creatively use specific Fair Trade interventions to defend their own priorities and rupture Fair Trade's imbrications with local patriarchies. Women tea farmers creatively juxtapose Fair Trade and swaccha vyāpār, a local translation of Fair Trade, to defend their own entrepreneurial ambitions and question the depoliticizing tendencies within transnational justice regimes that use them as instruments of market based justice. Therefore, in Darjeeling, we witness the emergence of new modalities of women's collective self-governance, which are influenced by interactions with market forces but at the same time stand to critique them.

Geographical indications (GIs) 1 are widely perceived to provide prospects for new forms of rural development, community autonomy, preservation of cultural traditions, and even the conservation of biological diversity when * Rosemary J. Coombe is the Tier One Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication and Culture at York University. She gratefully acknowledges the research and editorial assistance of Laura Fox and

- by S. Ali Malik
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- Geography, Intellectual Property, Geographical Indications, Plantations

- by S. Ali Malik
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- Intellectual Property, Political Science, Race and Ethnicity, Rural Development

The dissertation is basically based on the idea of Foucauldian model of biopolitics that the colonial Darjeeling hills had experienced in terms of the outbreak of disease and the responses to it. Methodologically it is possible to develop such a model because the study witnesses a pattern that how the colonial commonality to know about the oriental world had been shifted to the level of power and coercion within the structure of state apparatus. Empirically the attempt to establish a hill sanatorium in the Darjeeling hills and the importation of the western notion of medicine were not only a phenomenon that was closely connected with colonialism but also coincidental as both processes at that point of time (1835) had witnessed the phase of disjuncture from its earlier one (i.e. Separation of Darjeeling from Sikkim and end of the coexistence of western medicine with the traditional system). The general assumption is that the possession of the Darjeeling hills by the colonist was an almost incidental fact but the necessity of introducing western medicine was largely designed by the imperial desire. A number of researchers have come to the conclusion that hill stations were the finest place for the prevention of ill-health rather than its cure and most of the physicians of the early nineteenth century were also well informed that the high altitude regions were not free from the contagious diseases. In spite of having the realisation about these facts, the authorities were in favour of relocating the British troops and European civilians to the hill areas because of their climatic suitability on the one hand and to recuperate from the unbearable hot weather and the disease-ridden land of Bengal on the other. Darjeeling hills including its Sub-Himalayan regions were notoriously famous for malarious fever and other diseases. So the introduction of western medicine was a prerequisite there although initially for the imperial forces. But in course of time specifically from the second half of the nineteenth century, the practice of western medicine became a part of the apparatus of the state as it brought the hill indigenous people under its purview. While there was a humanitarian aspect to their work, its political value was recognised as being of primary importance to the interests of the colonial state. Considering the crucial questions of power, ideology, hegemony it has therefore been an attempt to situate the need and justification of the present study within the processes and events that took place within the time span of a century in the area of Darjeeling hills.

- by Dr. Sudip Saha
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- History of Medicine, Hegemony, Colonial Medicine, Medical History
- by Jayeeta Sharma and +1
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- Ethnic Studies, South Asian Studies, Himalayan culture, Race and Ethnicity