A History of Assam c24.26

c24.26

The labour force. There are very few landless labourers in Assam, and people who have land naturally prefer the independence and ease of their position as cultivators to the discipline and regular labour of the tea gardens. It was thus found necessary, at a very early stage, to seek for tea garden coolies elsewhere, and in 1853 the Assam Company had already begun to import labourers from Bengal. This involved legislation; and from 1863 to 1901 a series of enactments were passed, with the two-fold object of ensuring to the employer the services of the labourers imported by him for a period sufficiently long to enable him to recoup the cost of recruiting and bringing them to the garden, on the one hand, and, on the other, of protecting the labourers against fraudulent recruitment, providing for them a proper and sanitary system of transport, and securing their good treatment and adequate remuneration during the term of their labour contracts. The last of these special Acts has been repealed, except in so far as it regulates recruitment, and the only labour contracts now enforceable, otherwise than in the civil courts, are those made under Act XIII of 1859 as amended in 1920. This Act was not originally intended to be used on tea gardens, and its repeal has more than once been under consideration. The most suitable coolies are the aboriginal tribes of Chota Nagpur and the neighbourhood; but the supply of these is insufficient, and is eked out by plains people from the United Provinces and elsewhere, who require a long period of acclimatization, and, even then, are seldom quite satisfactory.