scholarly journals Addressing the Human Cost of Assam Tea: An agenda for change to respect, protect and fulfil human rights on Assam tea plantations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabita Banerji ◽  
Robin Willoughby
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Tea Plantations ◽  
Human Cost ◽  
Assam Tea

scholarly journals Corporate Responsibility for Human Rights in Assam Tea Plantations: A Business and Human Rights Approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (18) ◽  
pp. 7409
Author(s):  
Madhura Rao ◽  
Nadia Bernaz
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Corporate Responsibility ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Tea Plantation ◽  
Business And Human Rights ◽  
Tea Plantations ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights ◽  
Assam Tea ◽  
Corporate Social

This paper explores how UK-based companies deal with their responsibility to respect the human rights of Assam (India) tea plantation workers. Through qualitative content analysis of publicly available corporate reports and other documents, it investigates how companies approach and communicate their potential human rights impacts. It highlights the gap between well-documented human rights issues on the ground and corporate reports on these issues. It aims to answer the following research question: in a context where the existence of human rights violations at the end of the supply chain is well-documented, how do companies reconcile their possible connection with those violations and the corporate responsibility to respect human rights under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights? This paper reveals the weakness of the current corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach from the perspective of rights-holders. It supports a business and human rights approach, one that places the protection of human rights at its core.

Interview with Estela Barnes de Carlotto

2017 ◽  
Vol 99 (905) ◽  
pp. 487-495
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Human Cost ◽  
Insight Into

Estela Barnes de Carlotto is an Argentinian human rights activist and president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. One of her daughters, Laura Estela Carlotto, was abducted while pregnant in Buenos Aires at the end of 1977. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo association was founded that same year, with the aim of recovering children kidnapped during the dictatorship, some of whom were born to abducted mothers. The Grandmothers seek both their grandchildren and their own children. They estimate that around 500 kidnapped grandchildren have been illegally adopted into other families.This interview highlights the human cost of forced disappearance for the families left behind, who know neither the fate nor the whereabouts of their loved ones. Drawing on her vast experience of leading and advocating for these families, Estela gives us valuable insight into the role that relatives can play in developing mechanisms to trace missing people.

Locating 'Coolie' Women's Health in Tea Plantation Environments in Colonial Assam

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-228
Author(s):  
Namrata Borkotoky
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Tea Plantation ◽  
Female Workers ◽  
Manual Labour ◽  
Tea Plantations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Added Benefit ◽  
Assam Tea ◽  
Biological Reproduction ◽  
Female Presence

The history of Assam tea plantations in India is well-documented, yet a gender sensitive environmental history of these colonially-introduced plantation landscapes is absent. The colonial tea planters saw advantages in a growing female presence in their plantations, in terms of increased male ties to the plantation, lower wages for female workers and the added benefit of biological reproduction that would fulfil the need for manual labour in these plantations for generations. This paper attempts to understand how this plantation structure in general and the work regime in particular relied on a particular type of gender identity, which in turn had a detrimental effect on the health of the women labourers in this new landscape.

scholarly journals The ‘Right to Have Rights’ 65 Years Later: Justice Beyond Humanitarianism, Politics Beyond Sovereignty

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Howard
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Human Cost ◽  
The Right

Readers of Hannah Arendt’s now classic formulation of the statelessness problem in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism abound at a moment when the number of stateless peoples worldwide continues to rise exponentially. Along with statelessness, few concepts in Arendt scholarship have spawned such a volume of literature, and perhaps none have provoked as much interest outside of the field of philosophy, as ‘the right to have rights.’ Interpreting this enigmatic term exposes the heart of our beliefs about the nature of the political and has important consequences for how we practice politics on a global scale because it implicitly takes plural human beings, and not the citizen, as its subjects. Arendt’s conceptualization of this problem remains unsurpassed in its diagnosis of the political situation of statelessness, as well as its intimate description of the human cost of what she refers to as ‘world loss,’ a phenomenon that the prevailing human rights and global justice discourse does not take into account. And yet, as an alternative framework for thinking about global politics, the right to have rights resists easy interpretation, let alone practical application.

scholarly journals Sirdars as Intermediaries in Nineteenth-century Indian Ocean Indentured Labour Migration*

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 462-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
CRISPIN BATES ◽  
MARINA CARTER
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Indian Ocean Region ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Tea Industry ◽  
Tea Plantations ◽  
Ocean Region ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Assam Tea

AbstractThe sirdar (also termed sardar and jobber in Indian historiography)—foreman, recruiter, at once a labour leader and an important intermediary figure for the employers of labour both in India and in the sugar colonies—is reassessed in this article. Tithankar Roy's thoughtful 2007 article looked at how the sirdars’ multiple roles represent an incorporation of traditional authority in a modern setting, giving rise to certain contradictions. In 2010 Samita Sen, conversely, developed Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's argument about the use of labour intermediaries in colonial India to reveal how, in the case of the Assam tea plantations, the nexus between contractors and sirdars belies the ‘benign’ role often accorded to the intermediary within narratives from the tea industry. This article provides examples from the overseas labour destinations in the Indian Ocean region, particularly Mauritius, to further develop and nuance the debate, through an assessment of the complexity of sirdari roles in the colonial Indian labour diaspora.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document