Smart Tea villages' empowering Assam's small tea growers

Guwahati: Assam's small tea growers, forming the backbone of the 200-year-old tea industry, have long faced challenges of getting remunerative prices, limited access to resources and markets but an initiative to create 'Smart Tea villages' has brought in changes, leading to their empowerment through sustainable practices.

A programme titled 'Trinitea', launched by the company Solidaridad Network to complement the Tea Board's initiatives for the small tea growers aims to enhance the competitiveness of the farmers by hand-holding them to move up the value chain, the company's managing director Shatadru Chattopadhayay told PTI.

The state has about 1.22 lakh registered small tea growers who account for 52 per cent of the total supply of tea leaves in the state but faced numerous challenges and "we have tried to address these issues by creating smart tea villages'', he said.

''The primary aim of the initiative is to promote good agricultural, social and environmental practices which will help in improving the quality of green leaf and thereby help them to get better remunerative prices'', he said.

Six approaches have been adopted in the process of creating smart tea villages and these include weather, water, carbon, knowledge, energy and market smart, he said.

The first approach towards being weather smart includes the use of specific mobile apps created for the purpose of information on the state of local weather throughout the year and not become its victim while water smart includes better irrigation facilities and saving of water for more crops, he said.

The programme focuses on 'carbon smart' by restoring degraded soil, using less water, reduced the use of fertilizers and improving productivity.

"Carbon smart helps the soil to be more resilient to climate change impact as healthier soil helps to effectively withstand drought and heavy rainfall", he said.

The small tea farmers also lack access to the latest information related to agricultural practices and this project aims to take the best of knowledge of tea experts to them through phones as well as regular training organized by the Assam Agricultural University’s (AAU) out-reach programmes in respective villages, Chattopadhayay said.

"We are also looking towards more usage of solar and biogas plants to reduce the use of energy from fossil fuels", he added.

The initiative is also motivating farmers to work together and strengthen their associations so that they have better collective bargaining power in the market.

"This will lead to better prices for their produce, reduce input cost through collective purchasing, processing and packaging of their own tea", he said.

The programme, though pan-India, is mostly focused on Assam with over 60 per cent of the growers covered so far in the tea districts of Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Jorhat and Udalguri, the company’s Senior Advisor (Tea) Gangan Boriah said.

As the average holdings of the growers are minuscule and scattered, "so we have identified them, mapped their holdings, their location, the amount of leaf produced and the supply points. All these have been digitally mapped and are available on our dashboards", he said.

The tea factories often complained of poor quality leaves and so we are encouraging the growers to form self-help groups and adopt the various approaches of better agricultural practices, Boriah added.

"The Tea Board has also come up with several schemes to support the growers organized in SHGs and this has added weight and complemented our programmers", he said.

Besides, it is also providing the growers with traceability systems, ensuring transparency and accountability in the supply chain, enabling them to track their teas from the plantation to the consumer and ensuring that the teas are ethically produced, sustainable, and of the highest quality, he added.

A small tea grower Dilip Saikia of Roborguri village in Tinsukia said that he had been associated with this programme for the last two years and took the regular training provided by experts.

"I also did soil testing of my tea garden and following the report along with expert's recommendations, I applied half of the fertilizer than earlier used but now more crop is being reaped", he said.

Another grower Kalpajyoti Sonowal of Phillobari in Tinsukia said that the lockdown due to the pandemic had created immense difficulties for him and the faulty plucking of leaves by the workers had resulted in huge losses.

"On the advice of experts, we adopted the step plucking method which has led to better produce and my garden is now thriving", Sonowal added.