Changing Rainfall and Swinging Tea Production: The Correlates and Perception of Social Ecology of Tea Garden

Tea is the second most commonly consumed beverages, after water, across the globe. However, the quality and aroma of the produce largely depends on different climatic factors like temperature, rainfall, altitude etc. Even a slight alteration in these climatic factors, affects the quality and production adversely. Climate change, a global challenge, is a big threat to the tea industry as well as its workers. With degraded quality and swinging production due to changing rainfall and temperature, hundreds of tea gardens have been closed down in the past few decades, putting livelihood of thousands of tea workers to question. This paper attempts to find how the changing rainfall and swinging tea production varies with the profile characteristics of the tea workers. The study was conducted in the Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Dooars districts of West Bengal with 90 randomly selected tea workers from nine randomly selected tea gardens, three each belonging to three different altitudes. All the results has been analyzed using statistical tools of correlation coefficient, multiple and stepwise regression and path analysis. The results shows that treatment and mobility are two important variable explaining the variation in perception on change in rainfall and perception on tea production respectively. It has also been found that variables like income, treatment and garments have been reliable predictors for estimating the change in rainfall whereas the variable mobility exhibits a positive and significant relationship with perceived change in tea production. The regression analysis showed that treatment has explained 19.4 per cent of total variation in case of perceived change in rainfall and mobility has explained 16 per cent of total variance in case of perceived change in tea production.