BANGLADESH produces over 90 million kilograms of tea a year. The workers who make that possible earn Tk 187 a day.
Bangladesh recently aligned its National Tea Day with May 21, which the United Nations recognises as International Tea Day. The decision makes sense. A country with more than 160 tea gardens, producing tea on an industrial scale, deserves to be part of the global conversation about this ancient beverage.
But as we raise our cups today, one honest question should follow: who exactly are we celebrating, and for whom does this day truly matter?
Nation that runs on tea
WALK through any street in Dhaka, Dhanmondi, Mirpur, or Mohammadpur, and the arithmetic of tea is everywhere. Stalls cluster every few metres. A cup costs next to nothing. Tea in Bangladesh is not a luxury or even a habit; it is a rhythm, a pause between labours, and a connector of conversations that cuts across every class and neighbourhood.
Yet behind this abundance lies a contradiction that should unsettle any honest observer. We produce world-class tea on paper while serving a low-quality, cheaply brewed substitute in practice. And beneath that contradiction is one far graver: the people who make all of this possible are among the most systematically deprived workers in the country.
Tea that we actually drink
MUCH of what reaches the urban stall is low-grade dust tea, particles that brew quickly, produce a dark colour, and promise bitter intensity but carry almost none of the aroma or depth that tea is capable of. The economics are simple: milk, sugar, and quality leaves cut into already thin margins, so stall owners default to cheap and fast.
For many customers, tea is less a pleasure and more a functional habit, a throat-soother that accompanies a cigarette. When taste is secondary, quality becomes irrelevant, and the market obliges. Older stall culture offered something more. Biscuits, light snacks, and an unhurried minute of conversation once turned tea into a small social ceremony. That culture has largely been displaced by high-turnover operations where the cup is consumed standing in under three minutes.
None of this is unfixable. Basic hygiene standards for informal vendors, short training programmes, and modest improvements to storage and brewing discipline — these are not expensive asks. Street vendors in India develop recognisable brewing identities. Japan applies precision even in casual settings. Consistency in a cup of tea is an act of care, not luxury. But quality in the cup, while worth addressing, is genuinely the smaller problem.
Tk 187: wage behind every cup
HERE is a number worth sitting with: Bangladesh’s tea garden workers earn a daily wage of Tk 187.
This figure exists after years of struggle, including a mass walkout in August 2022 when workers across the country’s tea estates demanded Tk 300 a day. They never got it. The strike raised the wage from Tk 120 to Tk 170, and subsequent adjustments brought it to Tk 187. Nearly four years on, the original demand remains unmet.
To understand what Tk 187 means in real terms: a single meal for one person in Bangladesh now routinely costs over Tk 200. Workers feeding families on this wage are not struggling. They are going hungry. Oblate priest Father Joseph Gomes, convener of the Sylhet Catholic Diocese’s Peace and Justice Commission, has stated plainly that casual day labourers outside the gardens earn Tk 500. Even after the raise, the gap is not narrowing. Payment delays, sometimes stretching 20 weeks, turn an already insufficient wage into an intermittent crisis.
The broader data confirms what individual accounts suggest. A Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UNICEF survey found that 74 per cent of tea garden workers in Sylhet live below the poverty line. A 2025 study in the European Journal of Inclusive Education found that seven in ten parents in tea-garden communities cannot read. More than half of all tea garden children report hostility from classmates and teachers at mainstream schools, and most girls feel unsafe even travelling there.
Approximately 140,000 registered workers are employed across Bangladesh’s 256 tea gardens. The broader community, including dependents and casual workers, numbers nearly half a million people. An estimated 96 per cent have no formal employment status, meaning they have no legal ground from which to contest wage theft, wrongful termination, or denial of benefits. This is not incidental. It is structural.
Colonial inheritance, uncorrected
THE history matters here. Bangladesh’s tea workers did not arrive in these gardens by choice. Their ancestors were transported, in many cases under duress, from Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha under British colonial rule in the mid-1800s. What the British built was, as researchers have noted, akin to indentured servitude.
After partition and independence, the system did not end. It transferred. The same land, the same gardens, the same structures of control, under new national ownership. Workers were never granted rights to the land they lived on and tended. Many were denied voting rights for years after 1971. Today, the land belongs to the government, leased to garden companies on 20-to-40-year cycles. When leases renew, the workers’ claims are not on the agenda. Legal experts have long argued these renewal moments represent the most practical opportunity to extend land rights to this community. As researcher Shamsul Huda Gain has observed, there is still no sign of that intention.
Women who carry the harvest
The majority of tea pluckers, those who do the most labour-intensive work of harvesting the leaf, are women. They must pick a minimum of 23 kilograms per day simply to be counted as present. Falling short means a wage deduction. The work is relentless and weather-blind, with no consideration for rain, illness, or physical condition.
Beyond the workload, women in tea gardens face documented exposure to physical, verbal, and sexual abuse. Access to healthcare is limited. Education infrastructure is so degraded that some garden schools employ teachers on daily wages. The ILO’s ProGRESS project, funded by Canada, has begun addressing skills development and employment pathways for women in these communities, but the scale of the intervention is modest against the scale of the problem.
What this day should mean
INTERNATIONAL Tea Day was born in New Delhi in 2005, created not by governments or trade bodies, but by tea workers and trade unions who wanted the world to see the human cost embedded in every cup. That origin deserves remembering as Bangladesh aligns its national celebration with the global date.
The alignment is a welcome gesture. But a gesture becomes meaningful only when it leads somewhere. This occasion should prompt the government, the Bangladesh Tea Association, and civil society to commit to a concrete roadmap: raise the daily wage to at least Tk 300, end payment delays, extend formal employment recognition to the 96 per cent who currently lack it, and open the long-overdue conversation about land rights.
Until that happens, we are celebrating an industry while ignoring an injury.
We are drinking tea made by people we have chosen not to see.
Nafew Sajed Joy is a writer, researcher, and environmentalist.
