The tea workers, who are among the country’s little-known and repressed minority communities, should be brought under the social safety net programmes, former adviser to a caretaker government Hossain Zillur Rahman said yesterday.

He was speaking at a seminar on “Mapping and capacity building of tea workers and little-known ethnic communities of Bangladesh," at CBCB centre in capital.

Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD) organised the seminar with the assistance of the European Union and ICCO, (Netherlands) in order to share views on an ongoing project on the tea workers and the less-known communities.

Describing the miseries of the community, former chief adviser to a caretaker government Justice Muhammad Habibur Rahman said it was really surprising that a tea worker got only Tk 69 as the daily wage.

Dhaka University teacher and SEHD Chairman Prof Sakhawat Ali Khan chaired the seminar, while Professor Emeritus Rafiqul Islam, Head of Cooperation of EU Delegation to Bangladesh Philippe Jacques, and SEHD General Secretary Philip Gain spoke.