I am 60-years-old but when you look at me you might think I am 80. That is because I have spent the last few years scraping to feed myself and my wife since the tea gardens in this area started to close down.

Now the Human Rights Commission has looked at the desperate situation of the former tea workers and said it is a violation of our basic human rights and asked the State Government to investigate.

At least 18 tea gardens have closed down in Dooars since 2002, putting more than 30,000 workers out of a job. We have had no support and thousands of workers and their families are believed to have died of starvation or malnutrition – some choosing to take their own lives to escape this living death.

All the tea estates are owned by state governments who lease them to our bosses. Some crooked leaseholders have then taken out massive banks loans, pocketing the money before declaring the garden non-viable closing it down. This way the leasholder does not even have to repay the loans which run into millions of dollars.

In Kalchini, the tea garden where I worked, the 750 workers were not paid for two months before the leasholder closed the garden down in 2002 after securing huge bank loans.

Since then we have been eating boiled tea flowers to ward off starvation. I can not now move out of my bed. My legs are immobile. I have had a cerebral stroke and suffer from acute gastritis.

In the tea gardens, healthcare facilities are virtually non-existent, death from tuberculosis and malaria are considered inevitable. I saw my neighbour’s son die of a simple foot injury that he picked up while working at a nearby stone quarry. It had turned septic and killed him.

The lack of social and economic infrastructure has meant tea garden workers live in ghettos where the estate is their world.

I was born on this estate and have always lived here. I have worked here for 46 years. My father worked the tea estate before me and his father before him, back through four generations.

This is common for many tea workers. Moved from our native soil four or five generations back to work the estates, we have lived in isolation from the outside world. Illiteracy, alcoholism, superstitions, and eating just one meal a day are all normal here.

Sometimes at night, elephant herds from neighbouring forests raid our land and leopards attack us.

The gardens are so far from towns that other employment isn’t possible when a garden closes. Instead, we continue to try to scrape a living from the abandoned gardens. For three months every year, green shoots appear on the plants. We pluck these to sell to processing units, earning a dollar a day for the work.

This and picking up odd jobs is all that me and my wife, Jhalo, have been able to do since the garden closed. But it has been very hard and we are slowly starving to death.

The government has allocated free distribution of food grains and essentials for us but it has been very irregular. Sometimes we get the rice and wheat but then it stops.

I hear about what life is like in the cities and how richly some people live and it is hard for me to believe that we exist in the same country. No one thinks about us. We are like unwanted animals left to rot.

My wife wants to get me treated but we have no money to travel to the nearest town and get help from the hospital. So for me it is really about counting the days I have left.

But, I have one dream before I die. I want to see the garden that I have nurtured from my youth working again so that no one else will ever suffer my slow, painful death.

It can happen, more than 110 tea gardens in North Bengal are still open and profitable, and with rural elections due soon, the political parties want to attract the garden workers’ votes. It may be too late for me but not too late for the Kalchini tea garden.

Bifiar Munda told his story to Sweeble correspondent Nilanjana Bhattacharya