Laxmi Rani Das, a physically challenged girl, has to walk almost a kilometre to find a secluded spot surrounded by bushes on a hilltop to respond to the call of nature.
She usually takes her mother’s help in going out as she was born with only one leg.
‘We do not have any toilet. Most people here cannot afford sanitation facilities due to lack of money,’ said Laxmi Rani, who lives in the state-owned Daldali Teagarden in Sylhet.
She said she had trained herself not to respond to the call of nature at night. Unlike many of the 3,000 people living in Daldali Teagarden, Laxmi Rani, a student of Class VIII, is aware of the importance of sanitation because she goes to a school outside the plantation.
Her mother Aroti Das, 50, once a teagarden worker, left the job to take care of Laxmi and her two sisters while her two brothers support the six-member family by working in the plantation. Her father died eight years ago.
The authorities of the state-owned teagarden provide quarters to the workers but, in most cases, without any toilet facility. As a result, the workers have to use the plantation and bushes on hillocks for the purpose of defecation and urination.
Many generations of the same families have live in the same houses in the tea estate. A worker here gets around Tk 48 a day and a weekly ration of three kilograms of wheat. There are more than 400 workers in Daldali Teagarden.
The situation is similar in other tea plantations.
Sylhet Public Health Engineering Department executive engineer Mohammad Hanif said neither the government nor the non-governmental organisations had come up with sufficient measures to ensure sanitation facilities for teagarden workers, one of the country’s underprivileged groups.
In his opinion, the government’s target to provide sanitation facilities to all teagarden workers by 2013 would not be achieved if large-scale programmes are not taken in the areas.
Hanif, however, said the authorities provided around 250 sanitary toilet rings every year to each union of the country free of cost, which had not even been utilised properly for setting up sanitary latrines.
Raju Guala, a community leader of Lackatoorah Tea Estate, another government-owned plantation, said most people did not like to use sanitary latrines as they felt more comfortable to defecate in the open. Some residents in the plantation even think, if they construct sanitary toilets, these will spread foul odour, he added.
Raju said, at most, 10 per cent of the residents of Lackatoorah Tea Estate, a home to around 1,000 families, had access to toilet facilities.
Habit is a big factor, observed Raju’s mother Behula, 60. ‘All the workers here are used to defecate in the garden or by the stream flowing from the hills,’ she said.
A number of teagarden workers told New Age
that with the meagre wages they earned they could hardly make both the ends meet, let alone set up sanitary toilets.
Lackatoorah Tea Estate manager Imdad Hossain said the workers were not accustomed to using latrines. ‘We are trying to motivate them not to defecate in the open. We, too, feel bad about it.’
He said the plantation authorities had a plan to bring the workers under proper sanitation coverage.
Sabita Karmi, a teacher at an NGO-run primary school at Lackatoorah which runs for four hours in the morning, said the one-class school having 27 students had no water-supply or any toilet facilities.
Women, girls, and the old suffer a lot due to the lack of toilets in the plantation, she said.
Dinesh, 40, a teagarden worker, however, said he had just built a sanitary latrine for his family with the support of an NGO.
Sylhet City Corporation mayor Badar Uddin Ahmed Kamran said he could not use any city corporation funds for constructing latrines for teagarden workers as the estates were outside his jurisdiction.
Sylhet Sadar upazila chairman Ashfaque Ahmed said the funds allocated for each of the unions under the upazila was so inadequate that they could not improve the sanitation facilities for the underprivileged community in the teagardens.
There are around 6,000 registered workers in 19 teagardens, including the private-sector ones, in Sylhet district, officials said.
