Dheklapara Tea Garden is a village in the
Madarihat Birpara CD block in the
Alipurduar subdivision of the
Alipurduar district
Alipurduar is a city and a municipality in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is the headquarters of the Alipurduar district. Situated on the east bank of Kaljani River on the foothills of the Himalayas, the city is a gateway to Bhutan and ...
in the state of
West Bengal
West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fou ...
,
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
.
Geography
Location
Dheklapara Tea Garden is located at .
Area overview
Alipurduar district is covered by two maps. It is an extensive area in the eastern end of the
Dooars
The Dooars or Duars ( as, দুৱাৰ, duar, rkt, দুৱাৰ, duar, bn, দুয়ার, duyar) () are the alluvial floodplains in eastern-northeastern India that lie south of the outer foothills of the Himalayas and north of the ...
in West Bengal. It is undulating country, largely forested, with numerous rivers flowing down from the outer ranges of the
Himalayas
The Himalayas, or Himalaya (; ; ), is a mountain range in Asia, separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The range has some of the planet's highest peaks, including the very highest, Mount Everest. Over 10 ...
in Bhutan. It is a predominantly rural area with 79.38% of the population living in the rural areas. The district has 1 municipal town and 20 census towns and that means that 20.62% of the population lives in urban areas. The scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, taken together, form more than half the population in all the six community development blocks in the district. There is a high concentration of tribal people (scheduled tribes) in the three northern blocks of the district.
Demographics
As per the
2011 Census of India
The 2011 Census of India or the 15th Indian Census was conducted in two phases, house listing and population enumeration. The House listing phase began on 1 April 2010 and involved the collection of information about all buildings. Information ...
, Dheklapara Tea Garden had a total population of 2,641. There were 1,321 (50%) males and 1,322 (50%) females. There were 366 persons in the age range of 0 to 6 years. The total number of literate people in Dheklapara Tea Garden was 1,349 (59.24% of the population over 6 years).
Economy
Dheklapara Tea Estate, with 656 workers, was shut down in 2002.
One report puts it succinctly, “The tea estate closed down in 2002 after the owner quit the business. But the workers, some 600 men and women, almost all of them Adivasis, did not leave. They clung on in the hope of a revival. Organising themselves into committees, they started plucking leaves to sell to outside buyers. But the economics of tea do not support direct sales. At best, what the workers sell is good enough to fetch them Rs 35 a day, a third of the regular wage.”
Subsequently, the state government has been providing a monthly assistance of Rs.1,500 to each permanent worker of the locked out gardens. There are about 10,000 jobless workers and their families in nine closed tea gardens in the dooars. Everybody is assured of two plain meals in a day.
References
{{Alipurduar district
Villages in Alipurduar district