Introduction

India is one of the leading countries in producing and exporting tea all over the world. According to the 61th Annual Report of Tea Board, India produced 1.2 billion kilograms and exported 207 million kilograms of tea in 2014. This made it the second largest producer and exporter of tea after China (Tea Board of India, 2015). The tea industry is basically an agro-industry which depends largely on the work of manual labourers for its production. Given the heavily reliance on manual labour across the industry it is crucial to ensure that the workforce remains healthy. Poor health represents not only a threat to the person's well-being but to the economic fortunes of the companies involved. Studies have shown that healthy workers are more likely to be productive workers. Therefore, it is important to keep the tea garden labourers healthy. However, at present the health of tea garden labourers and the factors that affect it are not very well understood. On the basis of government regulation (Plantation Act, 1951), the tea garden authorities are required to provide medical facilities and other services such as subsidised food, free accommodation, piped running water and primary education for the children of labourers. It might well appear that access to these benefits should ensure that the workforce remains in good health. However, it is not clear whether this is the case as several studies have reported adverse health conditions among tea garden labourers (Biswas et al., 2002; Mittal and Srivastava, 2006; Medhi et al., 2006; Kundu et al., 2013). This presents an apparent paradox. Therefore, we hypothesised poor socioeconomic conditions may not the sole determinant of health but rather that the lifestyles and health behaviours of the labourers may play the key role in influencing their health.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has defined lifestyle as ‘a way of living based on identifiable patterns of behaviour which are determined by the interplay between an individual's personal characteristics, social interactions, and socioeconomic and environmental living conditions’ (WHO, 1998). To be more precise, the term lifestyle includes all human behaviours of day-to-day living. This is a complex and multidimensional concept.