Sanjay Bansal
Ethnicity and Race
Sanjay Bansal, former head of Ambootia tea estates in Darjeeling, India, discusses the near-feudal conditions which prevailed in the tea industry in this region, and the acute social problems faced by the Nepalese-speaking labor force, which was predominately female. Having grown up on the estate, he had learned Nepali, and was able to communicate with the workers directly about his plans for renewal by switching to organic farming. Bansal ends by discussing the severe crisis in 2017, when there was a region-wide strike caused the state government’s decision to replace Nepalese with Bengali as the second language taught in schools.
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