TEZPUR, Oct 18 - The Joint Action Committee for Tea Workers Wage (JACTWW), has strongly condemned the rebuff of the planters associations of the report published by Oxfam on October 11 last that highlighted the shocking scale of human suffering of the workers that produce tea in the plantations of Assam.
In a press release, the chief convener of the Joint Action Committee for Tea Workers Wage (JACTWW), Bibek Das said that the planters associations through a news report published in The Assam Tribune on October 15 demanded retraction of its statements stating if they ever come back for any purpose, research, development, or otherwise, they might face a lot of opposition, not by the management, but by the workforce. He also mentioned that this is a clear sign of the planters associations� behaviour that they are above the law.
�The warnings and threats given by the planters associations even before proper analysis of the Oxfam report clearly proves that when the issues of human rights violations in the tea plantations are highlighted at the international level, they are alarmed.� He added that interviewing 510 tea workers � both males and females � in 50 tea gardens, the report has brought out only a part of the large number of incidences of exploitation, repression and other human rights violations taking place in the tea plantations. The JACTWW endorses the findings in the report, he stated.
