Indians are known for their appetite for a good cup of chai — or tea — and the country is one of the world's leading producers. India's historic tea industry is going through a technological revolution that is paying benefits to landowners and distributors, and workers want a share of the wealth.

One area where the pickers are making progress is in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, where the hot sun shines down on a grove of tea bushes on the outskirts of the city of Siliguri.

A farmer slashes through the grove with his scythe, making the ripe leaves easier to pick. This is the famed Darjeeling district in the Indian state of West Bengal, and growing tea is big business here.

At the height of harvest season at Bagdogra Tea Estate, which grows black tea, it takes only eight days for a bush to fill out with new lime-green leaves.

"I like only tea," says Shambhu Ghosh, manager of the estate, adding that he has spent his whole life in the tea business. "Tea is good for me. Tea is good for everybody."

Every year this tea garden alone produces about 1 million kilograms of black tea, equivalent to the combined weight of 166 African elephants.

'Mostly women are specialists for the plucking, due to their soft hands — it is a soft thing.'—Shambhu Ghosh, Bagdogra Tea Estate manager

The garden was started 100 years ago, and over the decades has been expanded and handed down within the same family. A permanent staff of 480 now plucks and processes the tea leaves here year round.

"Mostly women are specialists for the plucking, due to their soft hands — it is a soft thing," Ghosh says. "It needs care like a child. That is why women [are] experts."

From July to November, during the high season, an additional 160 temporary workers like Rita Das are brought in to help.

"We like this job for many reasons," Das says through a Bengali translator. "Mainly because we want to do better in life, and our husbands cannot do better as they don't have a job."

"We don't like to work in peoples' houses — doing cleaning, washing dishes, as we are low-caste folks. That's why we like to work here," she adds.

High-tech trade

India's tea industry has started to modernize in the past few years, but so far it's the distributors rather than the pickers who have generally reaped the real benefits.

Once harvested, dried, processed and bagged, tea leaves are sold in auctions, for example. The traditional auctions of lots of tea have given way to online auctions, with buyers securing their bids over the internet. It's all part of a modernization effort to find efficiencies to better compete with tea-producing heavyweights like China for foreign buyers.

And there's a lot of foreign business at stake. India exports nearly half a billion dollars worth of tea worldwide. Its exports to Canada alone equal almost $5 million a year.

One kilogram of tea sells for about $2 at the auction, and the price gets hiked substantially by the time it arrives at grocery store shelves.

Low wages

But relatively little of this money goes to the people in the tea fields. The pluckers spend eight hours a day in the hot sun and must pick at least 20 kilograms of tea leaves to earn a daily wage of a little less than $2.

Workers sing as they pluck tea leaves in a field at the Bagdogra Tea Estate near the city of Siliguri in West Bengal, India. ((Pawel Dwulit))

In a country where 300 million people are very poor, the pickers are not on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, says Rajnikanta Verma, the former Indian High Commissioner to Ottawa. "See how they're dressed, see their level of awareness when they talk. Compared to the poorest of the poor I think they're very well off, they're very lucky to have these jobs."

But they're still very poor, Verma says, and $2 a day is a low wage even in India.

"It's not like $2 in Canada, that is true," Verma says. "But $2 in India, the way prices are, is still really very, very low. You cannot maintain a family, give them nutritious food, give them health and education, and have any standard of living."

That's why tea pluckers like Marisia Bada have started taking action. She and other workers at the estate went on strike last year to demand better wages.

"We strike because we are paid very little and work hard," she says through the translator. "We are striking to get our pay increased. We work from 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 5 pm. We have to earn to eat."

Tea estate manager Ghosh says the strike lasted only a few days before the two sides came to a three-year agreement. The daily wage increased from 67 to 85 rupees, and there will be another increase of 5 rupees in April. In 2013, the wage is slated to rise another 5 rupees.

"They're happy and I'm also happy," Ghosh says.

The overall increase works out to about 30 cents a day. It's not much by Western standards, but it's a big win for the women in the tea groves in a region of India where unemployment is high.

"We have to work," Bada says. "For us, this is what we have, to work in the fields."