No dreams, no gain: aspiration failure, poverty traps and the tea workers’ children in Bangladesh

What is it about?

This study focuses on the underlying causes of aspirations failure among young children of Bangladesh’s tea workers and how this aspirations failure hinders their future career plans and entraps them in poverty. Drawing on Appadurai’s theorisation of the capacity to aspire, Ray’s aspiration window and aspiration gap and Boudreau’s distinction and habitus, we investigated and explained the root causes of aspirations failure of tea workers’ children and its resultant effects on their life. We conducted a qualitative case study of two tea gardens located in greater Sylhet Division in Bangladesh to explore the lived experiences of the research participants employing a triangulation of methods for data collection including in-depth interviews, case studies, and direct observation. The study finds that aspiration failure among tea workers’ children is rooted in the structural constraints and other concomitant factors also created due to these constraints, which forces them into poverty traps.

Featured Image

Photo by Asantha Abeysooriya on Unsplash

Photo by Asantha Abeysooriya on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Tea workers are poor and marginalized people. Their children have extremely limited opportunities of education. Because of the lack of economic, social and cultural capital resulting from systematic and procedural poverty, exclusion and enslavement, the tea workers' children fall in aspiration failure, and the workers and their families are forced into poverty traps. This article has explained it. Policymakers and stakeholders concerned must pay attention to them and to save their life.

Perspectives