Pradhan Mantri Cha Shramik Protsahan Yojana (2024): Assessing A Targeted Welfare Scheme For India’s Tea Garden Workers

Policy Update

Shruti Sethi

Background 

India’s tea industry occupies a distinctive place in the country’s rural economy. It is the world’s largest producer and consumer of black tea, and in 2024 it ranked as the third-largest tea exporter globally, with exports touching ₹7,817.58 crore in FY 2024-25 (Press Information Bureau [PIB], 2026). Yet the sector’s economic significance sits alongside a long-standing social burden: tea is a highly labour-intensive plantation crop, employing 11.56 lakh workers in the organised sector alone, with women comprising nearly 58 per cent of this workforce (PIB, 2026). Worker welfare in tea gardens — housing, healthcare, education and social security — has historically been the statutory responsibility of estate managements under the Plantation Labour Act, 1951, with implementation resting largely with state governments.

In practice, this framework has produced uneven outcomes. Tea garden workers, concentrated in remote and often difficult-to-access regions of Assam and North Bengal, have continued to report deficits in access to quality schooling, primary healthcare and safe shelter. The Centre’s response to this gap has an unusually long gestation. While presenting the Union Budget 2021-22, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed ₹1,000 crore for the welfare of tea workers, especially women and children, in Assam and West Bengal, stating that “a special scheme will be devised” for the purpose (PIB, 2021). At this stage, the commitment was a budgetary allocation without a named scheme, an institutional home or an implementation design.

It took roughly three years for that promise to be converted into an operational scheme. In the Union Budget 2024-25, presented in July 2024, the government formally finalised and named the Pradhan Mantri Cha Shramik Protsahan Yojana (PMCSPY), carrying forward the same ₹1,000 crore corpus originally proposed in 2021, now with a concrete implementation window of FY 2024-25 and FY 2025-26 (ANI, 2024; Business Standard, 2025).

The Tea Association of India’s own welcome statement explicitly traced the scheme back to the 2021 budget speech, underscoring that PMCSPY was less a new announcement than the long-delayed operationalisation of an older commitment (ANI, 2024). The scheme has since been extended for FY 2026-27 in the Union Budget presented in February 2026, reflecting continuity in the Centre’s policy commitment (Sentinel Assam, 2026).

Functioning

Pradhan Mantri Cha Shramik Protsahan Yojana (PMCSPY) is implemented by the Tea Board of India, the statutory authority established under the Tea Act, 1953, functioning under the Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry (PIB, 2026). This places the scheme institutionally within the Tea Board’s broader mandate, which includes not only production and trade promotion but also an explicit remit to “help secure better working conditions for tea workers” (PIB, 2026).

The scheme is structured around three components, each targeting a distinct welfare dimension:

1. Cha Shramik Shiksha Yojana (CSSY) is focused on strengthening educational infrastructure and learning opportunities for children of tea garden workers.
2. Cha Shramik Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (CSSSY) is aimed at upgrading healthcare facilities and medical services within tea garden regions.
3. Cha Shramik Aashray Yojana (CSAY) is directed at infrastructure creation, primarily the construction of resting sheds for workers (PIB, 2026; Telangana Today, 2026).

Geographically, the scheme is confined to Assam and West Bengal, the two states that together account for over 80 per cent of India’s tea production (PIB, 2026), and is designed to reach more than 10 lakh tea garden workers across 1,210 tea gardens in the two states (Outlook Business, 2026). Tea Board Deputy Chairman C. Murugan has clarified that the scheme is entirely Centre-funded, with state governments responsible only for implementation, not financial contribution (Outlook Business, 2026).

Operationally, release of funds is contingent on the constitution of a State Level Committee (SLC), chaired by the state’s Chief Secretary and comprising representatives of both the state and central governments. This committee approves and prioritises project proposals, which are then forwarded to a Steering Committee headed by the Secretary, Department of Commerce, and comprising members from the relevant line ministries and the Department of Expenditure, not below the level of Joint Secretary, for final approval and sanction of funds (Tea Board of India, 2024; Outlook Business, 2026). This single institutional requirement has proved consequential, as discussed below.

Performance

Implementation of PMCSPY has followed sharply divergent trajectories in its two target states  and the contrast is stark enough to be treated as the central performance story of the scheme so far.

Before assessing actual performance, it is worth setting out what PMCSPY’s design implies it should achieve. Figure 1 sets out the scheme’s implicit theory of change, from the constitution of a State Level Committee through to intended welfare outcomes. Each link in this chain assumes reasonably prompt state-level administrative action; the scheme’s design offers no fallback if that link breaks, which is precisely what occurred in West Bengal.

Figure 1. PMCSPY’s implicit theory of change, from institutional prerequisite to intended welfare outcomes.

Source: Author’s construction, based on scheme design details reported in Outlook Business (2026) and PIB (2026).

Assam has been the clear success case. Of its ₹293.5 crore allocation, the state had utilised ₹292.36 crore as of June 2026, a utilisation rate of over 99 per cent (Outlook Business, 2026). This near-complete absorption of funds suggests that where the institutional prerequisite (a functioning SLC) is in place, the scheme’s disbursement and project-approval pipeline works efficiently.

West Bengal presents the opposite picture. Against an allocation of ₹313.30 crore, the state saw zero fund disbursement for nearly two years after the scheme’s 2024 launch. Amit Kumar, Joint Secretary in the Department of Commerce, stated in June 2026 that despite the scheme corpus being designed for a three-year utilisation window, two years had passed without any disbursement, leaving only one year for the state to absorb its full allocation (Outlook Business, 2026).

Tea Board Deputy Chairman C. Murugan attributed this squarely to the state government’s failure to constitute the mandatory State Level Committee despite repeated requests from the Tea Board (Outlook Business, 2026), corroborating the PIB’s own assessment that West Bengal’s implementation was affected by “the absence of an equivalent committee” (PIB, 2026).

This administrative delay coincided with a change of government in West Bengal: the Trinamool Congress, which had governed the state for 15 years, was voted out in the 2026 assembly election, and BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as Chief Minister on 9 May 2026 (Akashvani News, 2026). This suggests the change in state administration, not just procedural streamlining, may have been the more immediate trigger for the SLC finally being constituted the following month.

The logjam broke in June 2026, when West Bengal finally constituted its SLC, clearing the way for fund release (Outlook Business, 2026). The SLC — chaired by Chief Secretary Manoj Agarwal — met on 4 July 2026 and finalised the state’s implementation plan, with a total outlay of ₹313.30 crore (The Statesman, 2026). Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari announced the plan publicly the following day (ANI, 2026). 

The West Bengal allocation breaks down as follows:

Source: Telangana Today, 2026; The Statesman, 2026

Under CSAY, the resting sheds are to be equipped with off-grid solar power, clean drinking water, seating and sanitation facilities (Telangana Today, 2026) addressing a basic amenities gap that has long been flagged in plantation labour discourse. The North Bengal Development Department has been tasked with inter-departmental coordination for the West Bengal rollout (Newkerala, 2026). At the district level, Tea Board officials requested project proposals from health and education departments across North Bengal’s tea-producing districts in early June 2026, with proposals routed through the SLC and then the Department of Commerce’s steering committee before funds are released (Outlook Business, 2026).

At the national level, the industry response has been positive: the Tea Association of India welcomed the FY 2026-27 extension, describing it as strengthening “need-based interventions in tea garden areas” (Sentinel Assam, 2026).

Impact

Because West Bengal’s implementation only began in mid-2026, robust outcome data i.e.,  enrolment figures, health service uptake, or shed completion rates, are not yet available in the public domain for this state. Assam offers a stronger, if still partial, proxy for impact: near-total fund utilisation (over 99 per cent of ₹293.5 crore) by June 2026 indicates that projects have moved from sanction to implementation at scale (Outlook Business, 2026), though even here, physical outcome indicators such as how many schools, health centres or resting sheds have actually been completed and are functional, were not available in the sources reviewed and would need direct verification with the Tea Board or the Assam SLC.

What can be assessed at this stage is design-level intent: the scheme’s gender focus is significant given that women constitute the majority of the tea workforce (PIB, 2026), and its explicit emphasis on children’s education and family healthcare signals an attempt to address welfare gaps that persist despite the Plantation Labour Act framework.

The scale of intended reach, which is over 10 lakh workers, positions PMCSPY as a meaningful, if modest, addition to India’s plantation labour welfare architecture, though it remains far smaller in outlay than the Tea Board’s other major instrument, the Tea Development and Promotion Scheme. However, the West Bengal experience shows a clear gap between this design intent and delivered outcomes, a reminder that within India’s federal governance structure, centrally sponsored schemes depend on state-level administrative action for last-mile delivery, regardless of how well-designed the scheme is at the Centre.

Emerging Issues

A few structural concerns merit attention:

• A long gap between announcement and design. PMCSPY’s own history illustrates a pattern worth flagging independently of the West Bengal-specific delay discussed below: the underlying ₹1,000 crore commitment was announced in the Union Budget 2021-22, but the scheme was not formally designed, named, or given an implementation timeline until the 2024-25 Budget — a three-year gap during which, per contemporaneous opposition complaints, the funds had “yet to improve” conditions on the ground. This raises a broader question about the distinction between a budgetary announcement and an operational scheme, and about how such gaps should be tracked and reported.
• Federal implementation asymmetry. The scheme’s design makes central funding contingent on state-level institutional action (constitution of an SLC). The gap between Assam’s near-total fund utilisation (over 99 per cent) and West Bengal’s zero disbursement over two of the scheme’s three sanctioned years is a stark illustration of how a single administrative pre-condition can determine whether an entire state’s workers benefit from a centrally sanctioned scheme at all, a design vulnerability common to several centrally sponsored schemes that rely on state-level administrative machinery. With only one year now left in the current corpus window, West Bengal faces a compressed timeline to utilise its full ₹313.30 crore allocation.
• Sector distress adds urgency. Tea Board officials have flagged unofficial estimates suggesting 20 to 25 tea gardens in North Bengal could face closure, though exact numbers remain under verification (Outlook Business, 2026). This backdrop of sectoral fragility makes timely welfare delivery to tea garden workers, out of which many of whom are especially vulnerable during garden closures, more urgent, not less.
• Overlap and coordination with the Plantation Labour Act framework. Since housing, health, and education provisions for tea workers are already statutory obligations under the Plantation Labour Act (now being subsumed under the new labour codes), the precise division of responsibility between estate managements, state governments and PMCSPY funding needs clearer articulation to avoid duplication or gaps falling through jurisdictional cracks. Notably, the scheme’s own design documentation anticipates this concern: PMCSPY’s RFP for its Project Management Unit explicitly frames the scheme as a time-bound, gap-filling intervention, stating that once welfare gaps are addressed through PMCSPY funding, “regular [Centrally Sponsored Schemes] and [Central Sector Schemes] including provisions of the Plantation Labour Act 1951 and State Schemes” are expected to sustain outcomes thereafter (Tea Board of India, 2024). The scheme is explicitly designed to be “asset-light and service-heavy,” with sustainability planning for post-closure handover to regular schemes built in as a stated requirement (Tea Board of India, 2024). This shows the overlap risk has been anticipated at the design stage, but whether this handover mechanism functions as intended once PMCSPY’s funding window closes remains untested, and is worth tracking in future implementation reviews.
• Outlay relative to need. A ₹1,000 crore national outlay (later extended) against a target population exceeding 10 lakh workers implies limited per-capita spending once divided across education, health, and shelter components — raising questions about the scheme’s capacity to make a transformative, rather than incremental, difference.
• Data and monitoring transparency. Public availability of implementation metrics i.e., number of sheds completed, schools or health centres upgraded, beneficiaries reached is currently limited, which constrains independent evaluation of the scheme’s on-ground performance.
• Climate vulnerability could blunt the scheme’s impact. Tea Board of India data showed tea production up to March 2024 had declined by nearly 40 per cent in Assam and 23 per cent in West Bengal year-on-year, a drop the Tea Association of India attributed to deficient rainfall and unusually high temperatures (Syllad, 2024). Since worker livelihoods (wages, employment days, garden viability) are directly exposed to the same climate stress driving these production shocks, sustained climate-linked decline could compound the very vulnerabilities PMCSPY aims to address, even as the scheme itself does nothing to address the underlying climate risk to the sector.

Way Forward

• Standardise SLC formation timelines as a condition attached to future scheme sanctions, potentially with a default fallback implementation mechanism if a state fails to constitute its committee within a fixed period, to prevent multi-year exclusion of eligible beneficiaries. West Bengal’s experience — two years lost out of a three-year corpus — is a direct illustration of the cost of not having such a safeguard.
• Fast-track West Bengal’s absorption capacity given the compressed one-year window now remaining; this may require streamlining the proposal-to-disbursement pipeline (district proposals → SLC → Department of Commerce steering committee) that is currently in motion.
• Publish component-wise physical and financial progress reports at regular intervals for both Assam and West Bengal, enabling independent tracking of shed construction, health infrastructure upgrades, and educational outcomes.
• Clarify complementarity with the Plantation Labour Act / labour codes so that PMCSPY is understood and administered as a supplementary welfare layer rather than a substitute for statutory estate obligations.
• Consider outlay enhancement in future budget cycles if early implementation data (once available) indicates the current allocation is insufficient relative to the scale of unmet need in tea garden regions.
• Institutionalise periodic dialogue with tea workers’ trade unions in the scheme’s implementation architecture, alongside the SLC mechanism. Beyond improving design fit with workers’ actual priorities, a structured union consultation channel could serve as a grievance redressal mechanism, helping surface implementation gaps — delayed shed construction, healthcare access issues, and so on — more quickly than periodic progress reports alone.

Conclusion

Pradhan Mantri Cha Shramik Protsahan Yojana represents a targeted, if still early-stage, central intervention in a welfare domain that has historically depended on state governments and estate managements. Its design — channelling support through the Tea Board across three focused verticals — reflects a reasonable administrative logic, and its FY 2026-27 extension signals sustained policy commitment. Yet the scheme’s fortunes in its two target states turn less on the soundness of this design than on three interlocking factors: state-level institutional capacity, the quality of intergovernmental coordination, and the bureaucratic bottlenecks that can arise at any single point in a multi-tiered approval chain.

Assam’s near-total fund utilisation shows what is possible when a state’s administrative machinery — its SLC, its proposal pipeline, its coordination with the Tea Board and the Department of Commerce — functions as intended. West Bengal’s two-year non-implementation shows the converse: a scheme can be well-funded and well-designed at the Centre, and still fail to reach a single beneficiary if the requisite state-level institution is never constituted, regardless of the reasons for that delay.

This is not a funding problem or a design flaw so much as a coordination and capacity problem — one endemic to centrally sponsored schemes that depend on state governments to translate central intent into local delivery. With West Bengal’s rollout only just underway, the coming budget cycles will test not just whether PMCSPY can close the persistent welfare gaps facing India’s tea garden workers, but whether the intergovernmental machinery underpinning it can be made more resilient to the kind of single-point institutional failure that stalled the scheme for two years.

References

Akashvani News. (2026, May 9). Suvendu Adhikari becomes first BJP CM of West Bengal; Takes oath along with 5 Cabinet Ministers. https://newsonair.gov.in/suvendu-adhikari-to-take-oath-as-first-bjp-cm-of-west-bengal-today/

ANI. (2024, July 23). Tea Association of India expresses gratitude to FM Sitharaman for “Pradhan Mantri Cha Shramik Protsahan Yojana”. https://aninews.in/news/national/politics/tea-association-of-india-expresses-gratitude-to-fm-sitharaman-for-pradhan-mantri-cha-shramik-protsahan-yojana20240723200932/

ANI. (2026, July 5). CM Suvendu Adhikari announces Rs 313.30 crore Pradhan Mantri Cha Shramik Protsahan Yojana for West Bengal tea workers. ANI News. https://aninews.in/news/national/politics/cm-suvendu-adhikari-announces-rs-31330-crore-pradhan-mantri-cha-shramik-protsahan-yojana-for-west-bengal-tea-workers20260705103221/

Business Standard. (2025, February 2). Budget: Allocation for export promotion schemes dips 17% to Rs 2,250 cr. https://www.business-standard.com/budget/news/budget-allocation-for-export-promotion-schemes-dips-17-to-rs-2-250-cr-125020200361_1.html

Newkerala. (2026, July). Rs 313 Cr welfare scheme for Bengal tea workers. https://www.newkerala.com/news/a/cm-suvendu-adhikari-announces-rs-31330-crore-pradhan-266.htm

Outlook Business. (2026, June 9). Bengal moves to implement central scheme for tea workers’ welfare after two-year delay (PTI). https://www.outlookbusiness.com/news/bengal-moves-to-implement-central-scheme-for-tea-workers-welfare-after-two-year-delay

Press Information Bureau. (2021, February 1). Rs. 1,000 crore to be provided for welfare scheme for tea workers of Assam and West Bengal especially women and children. Ministry of Finance, Government of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1693884

Press Information Bureau. (2026, May 5). Indian tea sector: Production, trade, welfare and sustainability [Explainer]. Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?ModuleId=3&NoteId=158446&id=158446&reg=48&lang=2

Sentinel Assam. (2026, February 1). Tea industry welcomes extension of PMCSPY in Union Budget 2026–27. https://www.sentinelassam.com/breakingnews/tea-industry-welcomes-extension-of-pmcspy-in-union-budget-202627

Syllad. (2024, May 13). Decline in tea production in Assam, West Bengal; producers fear 50% crop loss. https://www.syllad.com/decline-in-tea-production-n-in-assam-west-bengal-producers-fear-50-crop-loss/

Tea Board of India. (2024). Request for Proposal: Engagement of an organization for setting up a PMU for implementation of Pradhan Mantri Cha Shramik Protsahan Yojna (PMCSPY) [Tender No. GEM/2024/B/5078375]. Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India. 

Telangana Today. (2026, July 5). WB finalises Rs 313.30-crore tea workers’ welfare scheme. https://telanganatoday.com/wb-finalises-rs-313-30-crore-tea-workers-welfare-scheme

The Statesman. (2026, July 5). PM tea workers’ welfare scheme gets final nod, receives Rs 313.30 crore outlay. https://www.thestatesman.com/cities/siliguri/pm-tea-workers-welfare-scheme-gets-final-nod-receives-rs-313-30-crore-outlay-1503613271.html

About The Contributor

Shruti Sethi is a Research & Editorial Intern at IMPRI. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata. Her research interests include Gender & Labour Economics.

Acknowledgement

The author extends her sincere gratitude to the IMPRI team for their expert guidance and constructive feedback throughout the process.

Reviewed by Purbaa Jagannath and Shruti Chandra.

Disclaimer

All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organization.

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