Photo by Rajan Zaveri
The Assam tea industry produces half of India’s tea and employs nearly 800,000 workers. Just a few companies dominate the landscape, with Tata Global Beverages, McLeod Russel and Unilever especially powerful. Tata own almost half of Amalgamated Plantations Private Limited (APPL), a further 17% of which is owned by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – the World Bank’s private sector arm – which invested $7.87 million in the company in 2009.
In accordance with its dual mandate of reducing poverty and boosting shared income equality, the IFC aims to implement a sustainable ‘worker-shareholder’ model. In theory, when workers become shareholders, they gain decision-making power in a company’s operations and lift themselves out of poverty. Yet in this case, seven years on, not only has the IFC investment failed to yield meaningful changes for workers, but APPL continues to breach a number of national laws (most notably the Plantations Labour Act, 1951) and is expected to be found in breach of the World Bank’s own standards.
