Published in today's [UK] Daily Telegraph:
Darjeeling tea plantations go to pot By Rahul Bedi in Darjeeling (Filed: 18/10/2003)
In the shadows of the Himalayas the tea plantations of Darjeeling, where retired British officers once held sway over vast estates, are up for sale at a fraction of a penny.
For one rupee several thousand acres of tea bushes, whose produce sells for less than it costs to produce, are available, complete with bungalow, a breathtaking view and a slice of history.
The tea plantations, redolent of the glories of British imperialism and a thousand sepia prints of moustachioed expatriates taking their ease on sun-drenched verandas, are in a parlous state.
In the once majestic Darjeeling Planters Club, where Mallory and Irvine stayed shortly before embarking on their ill-fated Everest 1924 expedition, the peeling walls smell of decay, and dust covers the once regal library in a uniform film of grey.
Like the teetering club, Darjeeling's delicately flavoured tea appears in terminal decline.
A productivity drop that has seen output fall by more than a third to around
20 million lbs a year, a 62 per cent rise in labour costs and a market collapse in its main buyers, the Soviet Union and Iraq, have combined into a formula for disaster.Extortion and killings by insurgent groups in the neighbouring Assam state, another major tea region, have added security costs to producers' expenses that include medical care, housing, electricity, education and food rations for the workforce.
A majority of Darjeeling's 78 tea gardens sold their harvest last year for around half of what it cost them to make it. Where 2.2 lbs of tea cost around 95 pence to produce, the consumer pays just 60-65p to buy it.
Sanjeev Seth, head of the Darjeeling Planters Association, piles on the woes: "Fierce competition from tea growers in Kenya, Sri Lanka and neighbouring Nepal, soil erosion, environmental degradation, indiscriminate use of chemical fertilisers and tough legislation have landed Darjeeling tea in this serious predicament."
As if that were not enough, decimation of the region's forest cover by the "timber mafia" has accelerated soil erosion in the rain-soaked hills where landslides now threaten to engulf entire estates. At the very core of the problem are the tea bushes themselves, nearly three quarters of which are over 80 years old, many of them either diseased or beyond their productivity period and in need of replacement.
Plantation owners, most of them with little or no experience of growing tea and desperate for quick profits, opt for chemicals and other short-term cures rather than wait seven years for new bushes to become productive.
Of Darjeeling's 78 estates, covering 40,000 acres and employing around
90,000 people, seven have so far closed down or operate erratically. In the neighbouring Dooars and Terai plains, where a substantial proportion of India's annual 1.75 billion lbs of tea is produced, another 20 have been abandoned.Innumerable tea estates, ranging from several hundred to several thousand acres, are available today for a token one rupee ( 0.014 pence) each. Mounting liabilities make them an unattractive proposition, forcing owners to suffer recurring losses before abandoning them.
Tens of thousands of tea workers have been laid off in the last two years in Bengal, Assam and in the southern Nilgiri Hills where the crisis is even worse. "The prognosis for the industry is grim," said JS Tarayal, manager of the Lopchu estate. "The only hope is to recapture the Russian market and move into the US where tea is increasingly being seen as a health drink."
With declining profits, standards of living on tea estates have undergone radical change. "It's no longer a way of life, but a job," said Harsh Kumar, a planter for 30 years.
The number of servants the "Burra sahibs", or plantation managers, are allocated has been reduced by a third from around 30 per household. Entertainment, fuel and soft furnishing allowances have been drastically pruned and even the legendary Moog and Barua cooks from further east, who jealously guarded their vast culinary repertoire, have disappeared.
"Gardens are no longer run by managers but by accountants who know nothing about ground realities," one Burra sahib said.
Club life that centred on tennis, football and golf, the bar and parties until the early 1990s, has all but vanished.
"Clubs are a poor shadow of their former selves," S Mohankrishnan lamented. "Where you would think nothing of driving 40 miles for dinner at one of them just a few years ago, there is no point anymore."
Cable television, home cinema systems and the internet have dealt the coup de grace to a way of life eroded by greed and exploitation.
"The old planters like the English, the Scots, and the Indians who emulated them, played hard and worked hard. The new ones are too busy merely keeping up with the changing times," Vijay Parmar said.
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