Paper short abstract:

Assam is a far eastern province of India with an ongoing separatist insurgency. My paper examines tea plantations in Assam and their role in public welfare. What are the competing strategies of the centuries-old tea plantations and the state as they struggle for political control over the citizenry?

Paper long abstract:

Few academic works have viewed the privately owned tea plantation as a quasi-governmental bureaucratic unit in itself, performing multiple administrative and welfare functions often expected of a sovereign welfare state. This interdisciplinary paper attempts to fill this gap in our scholarly understanding of the tea plantation in Assam, a post-conflict territory in Northeast India.

In a postcolonial republic, where the welfarism of the welfare state applies to every citizen, why exists the anachronism of a “state within an estate”: an estate totally in charge of the lives (as opposed to livelihood) of the population inhabiting it?

Today, the tea industry, being unable to afford all welfare measures, is demanding that the government shares this welfare ‘burden’ or takes charge. The larger political question, then, is: Why is the republic staying away from the welfare of a major section of its citizens?

For the field of Development Studies, this question assumes enormous significance, as it comes at a time when the Indian state is showing increasing tendency to devolve more of its erstwhile commitments to private players through mechanisms such as public-private partnership (PPP). Does this imply that the demand of the tea industry itself is anachronistic?

To answer these questions, this paper explores how the state is making inroads into the governance paradigm of the estate to break the enclaved isolation characterizing life on estate for nearly two centuries. The state’s role in the welfare of this segment of citizenry directly concerns development issues facing communities in the developing world.