Eco India: Meet the tea-growers bringing in sustainable practices to Assam's lush tea gardens

What started out on about 1500 square feet of land for Gobind Hazarika, today is a story for the ages. As one of the first organic small tea growers in the northeast of India, Hazarika is considered a first among equals. His hand-grown, handmade organic black and green teas having earned a name for themselves amongst tea connoisseurs across the world. I was born in Sabagan. I was born in Sabagan. My father's name was Petri Mohan Chanda Hazarika. My mother's name was Meenam Baba Hazarika. I was born in the year 1995. Hazarika belongs to the Lakhimpur district of Assam, the state with the world's largest coherent tea growing area, while India stands second to China in tea production. It was after a particularly bad bout of stomach infection, soon after he had sprayed his new tea garden with chemical pesticides, that Gobind decided to give up conventional cultivation. Scourging his backyard for herbs, adding mustard, oil cakes, water hyacinths and natural manure, Gobind embarked on his organic journey, much of it initially alone. There are many varieties of tea. Metaka, Belangoni, Jalmaniban, Puni, Mahadati, Akhashal, Bhari, Javadhoon. There are many varieties. More than 20 years later, Gobind's tea making processes haven't changed. Zero chemicals or machinery, the routine of plucking and drying leaves under the sun, pounding by hand and finally roasting over a fire. It is the tediousness that has ensured the quality doesn't suffer. I have been plucking leaves since I was a child. When I was seven years old, I had to go to the market to buy water. It took me a long time to get the leaves. It took me half an hour to get the leaves. It took me half an hour to get half a kilo of leaves. Over the years, Gobind has been exporting his brand of specialty tea to countries like Canada, Greece, Cambodia, Kenya and Denmark. But a home-grown set-up often means he cannot meet his overseas demands, despite a team of 20-odd workers. Moreover, organic farming in a remote hill region brings with it its own set of challenges. In 2011, I was in control of my crop. But in 2012, when I was in Colombia, I had to go to the market to buy leaves. At that time, there was a crop called Hello Pilates. I had to go to the market to buy leaves. That is my main job here in this farm. It is an electricity supply farm. Because in my farm there is no electricity. Assam's lush tea gardens on the rolling hills of the lower Himalayas have a long history. Tea was not grown in the state till the British introduced it 150 years ago, importing it from East Arunachal Pradesh, where it was endemic. Bringing in migrant workers, they enjoyed a monopoly over the industry right until the 1930s. It was only in the mid-80s that native small tea growers started flourishing in Assam. And as current chairman of the Tea Board of India and industry insider Prabhat Bezbarua confirms, today it is the conventional small tea grower that dominates the scene. We have around 200,000 hectares of tea which is cultivated by small tea growers. And of this, maybe 99.9% is conventional. And the produce is sold either to bodily factories or to composite gardens, which are tea gardens which have factories and plantations. So there's a huge connection between the small tea growers and the organized sector. I mean, you can't deny that. However, there are a small number of growers who are organic and who are making speciality teas, represent a minuscule percentage of the total number of small tea growers, as well as the total area that they are cultivating. If Gobind is considered one of the pioneers in the minuscule organic tea market, 285 km away in the Udalgiri district close to the Bhutan border, Tenzing Badosa is known for turning his ancestral paddy farm into a flourishing organic tea garden. Like Gobind, Badosa exports most of his organic teas. The reason, he points out, for the local market to not have grown as widely, being the premium charged and the general lack of awareness amongst consumers and conventional tea growers. When conventional tea is grown, the quantity is very high. Secondly, it has a lot of chemical fertilizers. It's also very cheap. In less money, you can get a cup of tea for Rs. 5. You can get a cup of tea for Rs. 3. And it's very cheap. If we look at the price per kilo, conventional tea starts at Rs. 80, Rs. 150, Rs. 200. But in the case of organic tea, there are so many benefits. People from other countries are ready to sell a kilo of tea for Rs. 1000, Rs. 10,000, Rs. 15,000. We sell our tea for a minimum of Rs. 1,000 for a kilo of tea. Here, conventional tea is sold for Rs. 80, Rs. 150. And people think that there is less crop in organic tea. This is completely wrong. All this soil is done by animals. If you can fertilize the soil, if you can give organic manure, if you take good care of it, then you can grow such good crops in organic. A pivotal partner in the operations from the start, and in charge of the team of women workers handling the sorting and packaging, is Tenzing's mother, Rohini Bodosa. Close to 80 workers are employed here in the making of specialty green and orthodox black teas. What started as a nursery for tea saplings with an initial investment of Rs. 1 lakh, has today grown into a 15-hectare garden with an annual turnover of Rs. 70-80 lakh. While Gobind and Bodosa's efforts prove that it is possible to grow organic and still be lucrative, with organic growers constituting less than 1% of small tea growers in Assam, there is a need for a much greater organizational push to be able to galvanize the movement. Well, this year is an exception. But in the normal course of events, small tea growers are producing an incremental 20-25 million kilos of made tea every year. So the entire growth is coming from that sector. However, the specialty and real high value teas out of that 25 million kilos is only around 50,000 kilos. So I am not sure whether I can say that the organic quality movement is catching on. I am not sure whether I can say that. But it needs to. Because we need to have a focus on incentivizing people to move towards organic cultivation and high quality specialty tea production. And if you do that, I think the whole quality profile of Assam tea will improve. And there will be a whole lot of spin-off benefits. Both for the small tea growers and for the Assam brand. Shyam Saikia is a recent convert. He is one of the 20 families who made the switch to organic tea cultivation with the aid and support of Gobind. A paddy farmer originally, today Saikia works a one acre tea garden. The leaves from which he sells to Gobind to market overseas. Why don't the poor people come to the market? Because the rich people don't have money to buy machines. But why do the poor people come to the market when the garden is open? I want to give them what they can get from the market. Because they can export what they want. There is no need for machines. While Tenzing too has been involved in training local tea growers, his plantation is known widely for another reason. In 2015, it was certified as the world's first and only elephant-friendly tea farm by WWF. When the elephants used to come to our farm from the Himalayas, the grass used to grow very well in the monsoons. When the wild elephants used to come and eat the grass, they used to eat it so well. They used to play with it and eat the grass. They used to break the tea plant a little bit, but we used to think that we should plant it for them too. Then we thought that we should do something for the elephants too. We didn't plant tea everywhere. We thought that we should plant it naturally too. And all the tea companies, the big tea gardens, they manage the drainage. And every year, a baby elephant dies in the drain. So we made a way for the water to go without drainage. Very lightly. Then we didn't have any fence. So that the wild animals can roam freely. And they can feel at home in our farm. The 5 hectare mini food forest grows everything from bamboo to apples and bananas. Today, elephants, deer, bears, mongoose, peacocks, hornbills and sunbirds roam peacefully here along with humans.