The manufacture of Tea (though still progressing) is simple, economical, and more or less known. Anyhow a beginner now will commence where others have left off.
Of course to buy a made garden cheap is better than to make one; but the result in this case is of course no criterion of what profit may be expected from Tea cultivation.
As many of the items to be calculated under the heads of cultivation, manufacture, and receipts will be better understood after details on these subjects are gone into, I shall reserve the consideration of “how much profit Tea can give” to the end of this treatise.
[CHAPTER II.]
LABOUR, LOCAL AND IMPORTED.
When the very large amount of labour required to carry on a plantation is considered, it is evident that facilities for it are a sine quâ non to success. Assam and Cachar, the two largest Tea districts, are very thinly populated, and almost entirely dependent on imported labour.[4] The expense of this is great, and it is the one, and consequently a great drawback to those provinces. The only district I know of with a good Tea climate and abundance of local labour is Chittagong.[5] Several other places have a good supply of local labour, but then their climates are not very suitable.
Each coolie imported costs Rs. 30 and upwards (it used to be much more) ere he arrives on the garden and does any work. After arrival he has to be housed; to be cared for and physicked when sick; to be paid when ill as when working; to have work found for him, or paid to sit idle when there is no work; and in addition to all this every death, every desertion, is a loss to the garden of the whole sum expended in bringing the man or woman. Contrast this with the advantages of local labour. In many cases no expense for buildings is necessary, as the labourers come daily to work from adjacent villages, and in such cases no expense is entailed by sick men, for these simply remain at home. There is no loss by death or desertions. When no work is required on the garden, labour is simply not employed. All this makes local labour, even where the rate of wages is high, very much cheaper than imported.
The action of Government in the matter of imported labour has much increased the difficulties and expense necessarily attendant on it. It is a vexed and a very long question which I care not to enter into minutely, for it has been discussed already ad nauseam; still I must put on record my opinion, after looking very closely into it, that the Government has not acted wisely, inasmuch as any State interference in the relations of employer and employed (outside the protection which the existing laws give) is a radical mistake. As for the law passed on the subject to the effect that a coolie who has worked out his agreement and voluntarily enters into a new one shall be, as before, under Government protection, and his employer answerable as before to Government, for the way he is housed, treated when sick, &c., it is not easy to see why such enactments are more necessary in his case than in that of any other hired servant or labourer throughout all India.
All evidence collected, all enquiries made, tend to show that coolies are well treated on Tea estates. It is the interest of the proprietors and managers to do so, and self-interest is a far more powerful inducement than any the Government can devise. The meddling caused by the visits of the “Protector of Coolies”[6] to a garden conduces to destroy the kind feelings which should (and in spite of these hindrances often do) exist between the proprietor or manager and his men. I do not hesitate in my belief that imported coolies on Tea plantations would be better off in many ways were all Government interference abolished.