Jalpaiguri Dooars Tea Garden Elephant Corridor Ecology

Jalpaiguri district's Dooars (doorway) region at the Bhutan-Bengal foothills is blanketed with CTC tea gardens that produce the bulk of Bengal's tea output for domestic consumption, alongside the forests of the Gorumara National Park and Chapramari Wildlife Sanctuary that provide critical elephant corridor between the Bhutan foothills and the Terai. The Dooars tea garden communities — primarily descendants of Oraon, Munda, and Santhali tribal workers brought from Jharkhand and Bihar by British planters in the 1870s — live in the plantation line (baagan coolie) system where the garden provides housing, ration, and healthcare within the estate, creating a form of place-bound labour with limited mobility. Jalpaiguri's bison (gaur), one-horned rhinoceros (in Gorumara), elephant, and tiger in the Jaldapara-Buxa corridor form one of West Bengal's critical biodiversity landscapes.