6. Smallholder Tea Farming in West Bengal, India: An Exploratory Insight

India, like most of the developing countries, is dominated by smallholder farmers. While these small farms were typically of subsistence type, recently a considerable proportion of them have massively shifted in favour of cash crops in many parts of the country. This is very intriguing because escalating economic vulnerability of the small farmers due to erosion of state support from the farm sector in the neo-liberal policy context and concomitant monetization of smallholder economy are self-contradictory. Although South-East Asian countries have already experienced such a phenomenon few decades back with respect to the rubber production, the Indian tea production, particularly in Assam and West Bengal, is following a similar trajectory. This paper is mainly based on Agricultural Census of India, National Sample Survey unit level data and an exploratory field work in the tea producing district of Jalpaiguri in West Bengal undertaken in 2019. The fieldwork consists of an exploratory quantitative survey as well as in-depth interviews of few small tea growers to understand the recent trends and patterns of restructuring of the pre-existing agricultural system in the region. This paper seeks to draw insights from cropping pattern shift away from food crop towards cash crops and the socio-political and economic environment associated with this recent phenomenon. It emerges that the small farmers have shifted cropping away from food crops to cash crops and that the small farmers who have adopted tea farming have mostly replaced paddy cultivation.