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Thursday 20 November 2008

Fading memories of the Raj in the tea gardens of Assam

Richard Orange says the Indian tea industry is enjoying a revival — but that the traditional tea-planters’ way of life, established by the British, is passing into history

There is not much to distinguish Dhanesheva Kurmi from the rest of the crowd at the Hautely Tea Estate, a remote garden an hour and a half’s bumpy drive from the Assamese town of Jorhat.

This return to profitability has brought the industry back to life. All but 22 of the closed gardens have reopened. The Indian government has pledged 40 billion rupees (nearly £500 million) to subsidise a huge replanting programme. But the tea industry has come back changed, purged of many of the vestiges of its old paternalistic culture.

An hour after we arrive, a four-wheel-drive trundles up. Girish Sarder, a tea-trader from Jaipur in Rajasthan, emerges. Flanked by two advisers and sporting mirrored aviator sunglasses, Sarder signifies a new order for Assam. He had arrived that week to take the estate off Kurmi’s hands, after striking a 14-year management contract with the estate’s receivers under which he escapes the estate’s past liabilities and, so long as he pays the workers and provides benefits on agreed terms, he keeps any profits. With liabilities of five times the estate’s asset value, this may be the best Hautely could hope for. ‘It’s in bad shape,’ Sarder says. ‘If somebody makes a change, it can be rescued. But any change can only happen when labour co-operates.’

On a healthy tea estate, the bushes are tightly packed, forming a green carpet of foliage three feet above the soil. Even a novice can see something is wrong at Hautely: here the bushes are old and many have died, so in parts of the estate they only sparsely dot the ground. The annual crop has fallen by two fifths since the workers took over, and the price they receive for their leaf has fallen from 9.6 rupees per kg to 8.25 rupees. After his three-year struggle to hold things together, Kurmi recognises the need for proper ownership. ‘We welcome the new management. We are workers and we should concentrate on working only.’

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