The tea industry began in India in 1851. Most of the tea gardens were situated in Assam. Since Assam was sparsely populated and the tea plantations were often located on uninhabited hillsides, the bulk of the sorely needed labour had to be imported from other provinces. But to bring thousands of people every year from their far-off homes into strange lands, possessing an unhealthy climate required the provision of financial and other incentives which the tea planters were unwilling to offer. Instead they took recourse to fraud coercion and persuaded the government to pass regressive penal laws. Thus the recruitment of labourers for tea gardens of Assam was carried on by contractor under the provisions of transport of Native Labourers Act (No 111) of 1863 of Bengal as amended in 1865, 1870 and 1873.

Read the passage given above and answer the questions:

Which of these reasons is NOT valid for the question given below?

The tea plantations was based on migrant labourers because:

Offered high wages to workers

The passage explicitly states that the tea planters were "unwilling to offer" financial incentives to attract workers from other provinces. This suggests that the plantations were not offering high wages, which would have been a logical way to attract workers to a sparsely populated area with an unhealthy climate.

The other options are all valid reasons for why the tea plantations were based on migrant laborers:

• Option 1: The plantations were based in sparsely populated areas. This meant that there was not a large enough local population to meet the labor demands of the plantations.

• Option 3: Work was labor intensive in nature. Tea cultivation is a labor-intensive process, requiring a lot of manual labor to plant, pluck, and process the tea leaves.

• Option 4: Plantation was located in uninhabited hillsides. This made it difficult to attract local workers, as they would have had to relocate to a new and unfamiliar environment.