How a health crisis is brewing in Assam

[Occupational Safety and Health - Related News]

On the morning of February 26, Janki Rawtia woke up feeling uneasy. The 36-year-old had no history of any serious ailment and no reason to think death was near. "I told her not to go to work,” Ratan Nayak, her husband, who also works at Doyang Tea Estate in Assam’s Golaghat district as a “faltu” (temporary worker) says, sitting on the courtyard of his two-room mud house in Tongi Line, a cluster of quarters for workers. Rawtia stayed back. “She watched TV, ate bhaat (rice), but when she was about to go to sleep in the evening, she started sweating profusely, "Nayak recalls.