The Tea Labourers of North East India

The impressive collection of twenty two research articles accommodated in this volume offer discrete descriptions on the history and migration of the workers in tea plantations in North East India and their settlements there. The articles included in this volume exhaustively cover the demographic characteristics; food habits of the populations; nutritional status; health and hygiene and morbidity scenario; economy, polity, social organisation; impact of Christian missionaries; status of women; socio-economic and political problems; trade union movement; their identity consciousness, etc. The volume will be of great use for wide ranging specialists-administrators, policy makers, planners and decision making bodies at different levels, development agencies, researchers in the field of social sciences and others concerned with migrant population groups.

Sarthak Sengupta (b. 1955) received his M.Sc. (1977) and Ph.D. (1983) degrees in Anthropology from Dibrugarh University and Gauhati University respectively. He also worked with the Anthropological Survey of India, Government of India and North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, for quite some time and conducted intensive field studies among diverse tribes and castes in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Uttar Pradesh. He has had to his credit nine well-knitted books on North East Indian tribes, and more than 180 original research papers published in various reputed national and international professional journals besides several chapters in edited volumes. He is an active life and executive member of several professional anthropological bodies and has been member of the editorial boards of Journal of Human Ecology, New Delhi (1998-2003) and Bulletin of the Department of Anthropology, Dibrugarh University (since 1989), Dibrugarh. He is presently a Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Dibrugarh University, Assam. His current research interests are genetical demography. globin gene distribution. population genetics, biosocial studies. diet and nutrition, indigenous health practices in tribal population of North East India.