Sorbopran Sngshkritik Shakti, a platform of cultural activists, has announced a day-long protest event titled Chita Kabya Concert in solidarity with the protest of tea garden workers.
The agitated tea garden workers are demanding immediate withdrawal of government decision of setting up a special economic zone acquiring land of three tea gardens of Habiganj in Sylhet.
The activists will initiate their protest programme by a song procession with the catchphrase-- Tea worker’s paddy fields can not be taken away-- around 11am Saturday at Soparjito Shadhinota Chattar at TSC of Dhaka University.
Hundreds of artists throughout the country along with a number of cultural groups of the tea workers would participate in the protest with the slogan Salute to those who consider crops not as a product but as their lives.
The programme includes paintings, documentaries, photo exhibitions, poetry reading and drama performances.
The organisers have made an open call to all to join the event to express their solidarity with the movement of the tea garden workers by protesting the government’s move to acquire 512 acres of land of three tea gardens for setting up a special economic zone.
The Bangladesh Economic Zones Authority (BEZA) has decided to build an economic zone on around 512 acres of land in Chunarughat, which was leased out earlier to Chandpur Tea Estate operated by a British company named Duncan Brothers.
Recently the lease has been cancelled to establish the economic zone.
Thousands of tea workers are in fear of eviction. It is learned that 951 acres of land out of 3951 acres are agricultural land where tea workers used to cultivate rice for the last 150 years.
The land was made cultivable by clearing jungles by the ancestors of the tea garden workers.
If the government acquires the land of the 1,6000 tea garden workers of different indigenous and dalit communities of Chandpur Tea Garden, their livelihood will come under serious threat as they have been traditionally dependent on cultivation of rice on this land.
Most tea workers are very poor and their daily income is around Tk69, which is one of the lowest wage-rate in the country.