Hello, today we are in Assam province, between Dibrugarh and Nagaland province, north east India.
We stopped the car to take some shoots to some women collecting tea.
I think about how much work is required to collect tea to permit, in western part of the world, to drink a cup of tea.
People here are working by hands, there aren't automatic machine to do this job.
Mainly young women do it. There were also men (I will publish another post about them) but they were doing another type of work, for example to bring heaviest stuff.
"The word ‘tea’ or ‘tay’ is derived from the Chinese Amoy dialect and tea was
known to the Chinese as early as 2737 B.C. The Chinese were the first to introduce it as a commercial beverage besides using it as a medical drink. China is also believed to be the first country to grow tea in a planned commercial manner. In India, tea was officially discovered by Robert Bruce in 1823 and within a few decades the produce from early tea estates was extensively exported to the markets of Great Britain and Europe. However, there have been reports of existence of tea in India long before the British discovered it, found in the forest of upper Assam produced by the Singpho communities of Arunachal Pradesh from where it was exported to the other countries.
Tea industry in India is one of the biggest sectors employing large number of female workers which is incomparable with any other organized business sector.
Women are in fact the backbone of the tea Industry in India who constitutes half of the total labour force in the plantations. The vast majority of women workers employed in the tea plantations work mainly as pluckers. Though, the tea sector contributes heavily to the national economy but the life of the tea garden workers, especially the women workers who are the prime drivers of the gardens are far from satisfactory."
(from “Stories Behind a Hot Cup of Assam Tea: Listening to the Voices of Women Labourers in the Tea Gardens”, sponsored by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India, year 2017)
Pictures taken with Nikon D800 and Sony Alpha 7iii cameras, Assam province, 03 february 2020.