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When the Bundapani tea estate closed last year, death arrived soon after. Deprived of health care and food rations, workers who had been scraping by on just over one US dollar per day were left with nothing. Bundapani's owner didn't warn the authorities for two months, and the workers, abandoned at the feet of the Himalayas, silently slid into catastrophe. 50-year-old Puliya Mahali is dying. Both Puliya and her husband Ramesh Mahali are former tea workers, but since Ramesh lost his job last year they don't have enough to eat. Most of the family is sick - Puliya is paralysed and Ramesh's daughter-in-law has tuberculosis, but there is no money for medicine. In the past year, at least 69 tea workers have died across Bundapani and four other shuttered tea plantations in West Bengal, according to the Right to Food campaign, which monitors the deaths and acts as an advisory committee to the Supreme Court. More than 16,000 people have been left in extreme poverty at the estates, spread across the Dooars plains below Darjeeling, the source of the famous brand known as the Champagne of teas. When the government became aware of the deaths - thanks to media reports - it launched emergency food and medical relief. But conditions remain grim. SM Tamang used to manage the Bundapani plantation and says there were 25 deaths within a year of the plantation closing "due to malnutrition and (lack of) proper medical facilities ." Dozens of men have left Darjeeling to find work, but women and those too weak to travel remain in houses on the estate. Many former tea workers find themselves digging stone from dry river beds but the work is arduous and irregular. Anuradha Talwar, an activist from the Right to Food campaign, said that workers were not necessarily dying of hunger, but from extreme deprivation. Established by the British in the 1840s, the plantations are among the only examples of large-scale organised agriculture in India, where most farming is done by small-holders. Colonial plantations relied on indentured labourers. Workers now have the right to leave and access to free primary education, but their dependency on the estates for housing and food means that in practice, little has changed. Their situation highlights how eastern India's tea industry has changed little since colonial times. The government has done little to penalise estate owners who abandon workers. In practice, the owners have few legal obligations to ensure workers' well-being. Most tea plantations appear to be functioning normally, though margins have tightened as rainfall has declined dramatically in West Bengal. In 2006, a wave of closures caused hundreds of deaths. But owners of working plantations say the industry is now healthy, and that only those who failed to modernise are seriously struggling. When plantations do fail, the owners often engage in lawsuits that prevent them from reopening under new ownership, trapping workers in limbo. In Dheklapara, which has been closed for 13 years, a committee of tea-workers sell the leaves with the government's permission. The abandoned workers, meanwhile, are caught in a struggle between the West Bengal government and tea-worker unions known for their militant tactics. The unions have published inflated reports of starvation deaths to gain leverage in wage negotiations. West Bengal's government has insisted that no tea workers have died from starvation, though it has started emergency food aid to the closed estates. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/665947c45497cc077572cb89aae28aef Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork