Activities of Department of History

Title: - Health, Education and Tea Garden Workers: A Study of Jagduar Tea Estate of Jorhat District
Start Date - 2020-05-01   End Date - 2020-12-01   Duration - 240 days.
Nature of the Activity: - Research Project
Summary: -
A Department Research Project on 'Health, Education, and Tea Garden Workers: A study of Jagduar Tea Estate of Jorhat District' was done by Dr. Gautam Das who is a faculty member of the Department of History and currently the Assistant Coordinator of IQAC, C.K.B. College, Teok.

The major objectives which we formulated in order to study about the  specific features of health , education among the tea garden workers of the Jogduar Tea Estate of Jorhat are basically concerned to understand the conditions of  health and education and also in respects of the living patterns, hygienic environment , medical facilities . In order to study about those conditions we also had to give emphasis upon the policies of the government in totality in respect of the welfare of the tea workers. We also tried to study the nature of responses of tea garden workers towards the process of deprivation. Most importantly we also aimed in studying the policy of the plantation company towards the welfare of their workers.One the distinctive features of the Jogduar Tea Estate is that the half of workforce in the garden are women and there is a great number of people who are dependent upon the basic forms of work in a tea garden and there are sizeable number of temporary workers.Although the government in recent years have been taking up efforts to bring better livelihood to the deprived people of the tea gardens but still the rate of poverty, illiteracy and ill –health has been endemic feature of the area under study. The project work helped us to know about some important characteristics of the workers of the Jogduar Tea Estate like that the lack of consciousness about their basic provisions of their rights in work field and where out of thirty respondents the twenty one respondents(70%) who did not know anything about those rights .There is also another feature which has come out of our research is that very few workers know in details about the Plantation Labour Act ,1951 and where interestingly out of thirty respondents the eleven respondents(36%) said they have hardly any idea about the Plantation Labour Act.Another important finding of our research work is that the majority of the workers about 78.3% are male workers and 82.9% workers are female .Those workers say that they are not getting adequate medical facilities for protection of their health. Only the 21.7% and 17.1% female workers say that they are getting medical assistance properly for protection of their health which is abysmally low in comparison with the actual percentage of workers. There is another major finding where it has been brought into clearer focus through the study is that malnutrition has been rampant among the women workers and that substantially has reduced the strength of the working force in act of labouring. The study has made it clear safe drinking water has still been a distant dream for the workers and which in turn has created water borne diseases .The urgent need of the hour is that the amelioration of the problems regarding the sanitation , drinking water and proper awareness about their rights could give a decent livelihood where the improved conditions of healthcare and better education facilities could give a new ray of light to the marginalized population like the tea workers of the Jogduar Tea Workers. 


  
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