Land Pattas Without Labour Rights: How Assam’s Tea Plantation Reforms Fail Workers
An extraordinary political spectacle has accompanied the recent announcement by the Assam government to grant land pattas to tea plantation workers. On November 28, tea gardens across the state were declared closed so that workers could watch the Assam Assembly pass the Assam Fixation of Ceiling on Land Holdings (Amendment) Act, 2025.
The West Bengal government had previously made similar announcements in late 2023. For a workforce that has lived for generations without legal rights over the land it inhabits, these declarations appear, at first glance, to signal a long-delayed recognition of historical injustice.
Yet once the choreography fades, what remains is a reform that carefully sidesteps the central question of power—specifically, the power of workers to negotiate the terms of their lives.
Plantation workers, mostly descendants of indentured Adivasi labourers transported under colonial rule, have long been denied land, wages, and voice in equal measure. The labour lines in which they lived were never merely housing arrangements; they were instruments of discipline, designed to spatially confine workers and bind them to the estate for employment, healthcare, and survival.
The current land patta announcements partially acknowledge this history by recognising workers as potential landholders. But they fail to recognise them as collective political actors. This distinction is not accidental. It lies at the heart of why these reforms appear generous while leaving exploitation intact.
Titles Without Terrain
The experience of West Bengal illustrates the limits of top-down reform. In December 2023, the state government announced that tea plantation workers would receive pattas of five decimals per family—approximately 2,178 square feet. The figure was fixed unilaterally, without consulting trade unions or workers’ organisations that have long raised housing and land as collective demands. For families that had occupied larger homesteads for decades, the patta did not represent expansion or security but legal contraction. Housing insecurity was not resolved; it was formalised.
The absence of negotiation ensured that the quantum of land reflected administrative convenience rather than workers’ lived realities.
Assam’s 2025 amendment exacerbates this issue by failing to specify a minimum land quantum. The law delegates the determination of land extent to future executive notifications, effectively transforming land rights into an undefined promise.
Trade unions, which serve as the primary representatives of plantation workers, were entirely excluded from the drafting process. This exclusion signifies a notable departure from the limited tripartite frameworks that have historically governed plantation labour relations. Land, which was once a collective demand articulated by unions, is now redefined as a discretionary benefit granted by the state.
Executive Discretion, Not Statutory Rights
This discretionary character is written directly into the law. The newly inserted Section 7A of the Assam Fixation of Ceiling on Land Holdings (Amendment) Act, 2025 offers no statutory guarantee of how much land a tea worker family will actually receive. Instead, it states that “the extent of land per family of a tea garden worker to be settled shall be such as notified by the Government from time to time” (Section 7A(5)), while even the conditions of land use are left to executive framing, with the Government empowered to “frame conditions regarding the extent of disposal of such lands for utility and optimal usage” through future notifications (Section 7A(4)).
Equally revealing is what the Act excludes: there is no provision mandating consultation with recognised trade unions or workers’ representatives in determining eligibility, land size, or settlement conditions.
Far from constituting a legally enforceable right, the land patta is constructed as an administratively managed concession, shaped unilaterally by the state and insulated from collective bargaining or worker negotiation.
Reforms Without Representation
This bypassing of organised labour has profound consequences. Delivering rights as gifts instead of negotiated outcomes undermines collective power. Pattas, distributed directly by the state, individualise what were once shared struggles. Workers are transformed from rights-bearing subjects into beneficiaries, encouraged to relate to the government as patrons rather than as negotiable authorities. Unions, which have historically linked land demands to wages, housing standards, healthcare, and dignity at work, are rendered politically redundant. The erosion of collective bargaining is not a side effect of these reforms; it is one of their enabling conditions.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the persistent denial of minimum wages. Tea plantation workers in Assam and West Bengal receive some of the lowest wages in the organised sector. As of 2024–25, daily wages are approximately ?232 in Assam and ?250 in West Bengal. In both states, these rates are significantly lower than the statutory minimum wages applicable to comparable categories of agricultural or unskilled labour.
This disparity is not accidental; it is perpetuated by a plantation-specific exemption regime that regards housing and basic amenities as substitutes for fair wages—a colonial logic that has endured into the present day.
Low Wages, High Dependency
In practice, this wage suppression ensures permanent dependence. When cash incomes are insufficient to meet even basic needs, workers are compelled to rely on plantation-provided housing, rations, and services, however inadequate they may be. Land pattas, especially when limited in size and restricted in use, do nothing to alter this fundamental imbalance. Without minimum wages that allow workers to survive independently of the estate, land ownership remains largely symbolic. It offers legal recognition without economic autonomy.
The systematic absence of universal social protection compounds the denial of wages. Tea plantation workers continue to exist at the margins of India’s social security architecture. Access to pensions, health insurance, maternity benefits, disability support, and unemployment protection is either weak or entirely absent. When welfare provisions do exist, plantation management frequently ties them to employment status and mediates them. Such an arrangement means that illness, injury, pregnancy, or old age can immediately result in the loss of income, housing, and healthcare. The risks of life are thus borne entirely by workers, while plantations are insulated from responsibility.
This lack of social protection reinforces intergenerational bondage. Children grow up in labour lines where schooling is often inadequate and mobility severely constrained. When families face medical emergencies or income shocks, children are pushed into plantation work at an early age, reproducing the labour force across generations.
Land pattas do not disrupt this cycle. In Assam, where land is tied to the plantation, resale is limited to workers on the same estate.
The exclusion of unions from land reform also has deeply gendered consequences. Tea plantations are among the most feminised labour regimes in India, yet neither Assam’s amendment nor earlier schemes in West Bengal mandate joint or female ownership of land. Trade unions and women workers’ collectives have long demanded gender-just land rights, recognising that land ownership can significantly alter power relations within households. By bypassing these organisations, the state ensures that patriarchal norms of property ownership remain intact, even as it claims to empower workers.
The denial of wages and social security is not merely an economic failure; it is a political strategy. Enforcing minimum wages would require robust labour inspections, confrontation with plantation capital, and the recognition of unions as negotiating agents. Universalising social protection would separate survival from employment, weakening the plantation’s grip over workers’ lives.
When we prioritise land pattas as the primary intervention, we avoid precisely these reforms. Giving land is easier than giving wages, granting titles is less expensive than providing pensions, and making announcements is simpler than enforcing them.
The spectacle surrounding these reforms serves to obscure these absences. Declaring holidays, staging mass announcements, and projecting land titles as historic gifts create an illusion of transformation while leaving the foundations of exploitation untouched. Workers are encouraged to celebrate recognition even as the material conditions of their lives remain unchanged. In this context, land pattas function as political substitutes for more substantive rights.
Housing insecurity, low wages, lack of social protection, and union exclusion are not separate failures. They are components of a single system designed to produce inexpensive, disciplined, and immobile labour. Addressing one element without strengthening the others—especially without empowering workers’ collective voice—does not dismantle this system. It stabilises it with a new legal form—one that plantations can accommodate far more easily than living wages or independent unions.
Rights Are Not Handouts
Land rights matter. But land rights divorced from minimum wages, social protection, and collective bargaining are fragile and reversible. They offer visibility without power, recognition without autonomy—and no means to exit plantation dependency.
The history of labour rights in India teaches us that durable change emerges not from benevolent gestures but from organised struggle. Until tea plantation workers are recognised not just as beneficiaries but as collective agents—through strong, independent trade unions—reforms will continue to arrive from above, celebrated in the moment and hollow in their consequences. What is being offered today may look like progress, but it leaves the architecture of plantation exploitation firmly in place.
Sushovan Dhar is a writer, political activist and trade unionist based in Kolkata. He can be reached at: dhar.sushovan@gmail.com