Look whos joined the Tea Party

It is definitely a silent revolution where the government has had practically no role to play. But apart from boosting the tea output of the country,the small tea garden sector has also provided employment to a large number of people in the state, said Cheniram Khanikar,president,All Assam Small Tea Growers Association.

According to the association,small tea gardens today cover over 1.10 lakh hectares of land,which has provided employment to over four lakh people.

While our association has over 70,000 members,a recent government survey has put the number of small tea gardens at one lakh. This works out to one lakh self-employed people,who in turn have provided jobs to over three lakh people,taking the total number to over four lakh, Khanikar said.

Production-wise,the small tea garden segment has a share of over 20 per cent in Assams total tea output. Their contribution is very significant. Last year,for instance,the segment yielded a little over 80 million kgs of tea out of a total of 450 million kgs produced in Assam, said Dhiraj Kakati,secretary,Assam Branch Indian Tea Association ABITA.

What is amazing is that this segment has expanded with little or almost no government support.

The small tea growers have several major problems,the most important being ownership of land. Since a large number of these gardens have been set up on fallow government land and degraded forests,the growers do not have any land ownership document. The absence of such documents prevents them from getting bank loans and various facilities available with the Tea Board, pointed out Khanikar.

The Tea Board norms classify a tea garden as small only when its total area is 75 bighas or less. But while it has come up with several schemes to support the segment,absence of land certificates has prevented a majority of the growers from availing these.

With land possession documents in hand,a small tea garden owner is eligible for a plantation subsidy of Rs 76,000 per hectare,apart from getting training and going on educational tours. We also give a Rs 5 lakh subsidy to self-help groups comprising at least 50 people having a minimum of two hectares of land for tea cultivation, said Ranjan Das,deputy director,Tea Board,Guwahati.

While Khanikar says that only about 4,000 growers have been able to get Tea Board facilities,a recent government estimate puts the number of small tea growers having gardens on patta land at 16,321. Tea growers are being given land pattas and possession certificates at the rate of four hectares per person under the Assam Land Policy of 1989, revenue minister Bhumidhar Barman had informed the Assembly recently.

A worrying aspect for the industry is the quality of tea produced from the leaves of small tea gardens. Quality has always been a major concern for the industry,as even a small issue can lead to a major impact in the global market, said Kakati of ABITA.

Though big companies and big gardens have their own mechanism of quality control,most of the tea leaf collected from the small growers is processed in a new category of factories which have come to be known as bought-leaf factories, Kakati added.

That does not,however,mean that tea manufactured by the bought-leaf factories are of inferior quality. Some of them really make very good tea which fetch a very good price and compete equally with the established companies in the auction market, Kakati said.

The gardens may be small in size. But they have made very big contribution to the Indian tea industry. Look at the large number of new tea factories that has come up exclusively for green leaves produced by the small gardens, said Kanakeswar Senchowa,president,Assam Bought Leaf Tea Manufacturer

As many as 210 such factories have come up across the state in the past two decades or more. Member-companies of the Indian Tea Association have also come forward to extend a helping hand to this new generation of tea growers.

The Association as a whole does not cover the small growers section,but most of our member companies provide a lot of technical support to them, he added.

This is not a small population whose interests can be ignored. And they also constitute a major segment of voters in the upper Assam region, pointed out Aswini Baruah,who has a two-hectare garden at Boroguri near Tinsukia.

The small tea garden movement has worked wonders,especially in the upper Assam districts. Growing silently over three decades,its biggest contribution has been checking rural unemployment in an unbelievably big way, said state minister for commerce and industry Pradyut Bordoloi.