Bitter times for beleaguered Darjeeling

The tea plantations of Darjeeling are in danger of going bust. Rahul Bedi reports from north-east India

The dilapidated state of the once majestic Darjeeling Planters' Club mirrors the decline in the fortunes of what helped pioneering Scotsmen set it up 135 years ago in the shadow of the Himalayas in north east India - the region's world- famous tea.

Like the rundown club (Mallory and Irvine stayed here shortly before leaving for their ill-fated Everest 1924 expedition) with its feeble attempts at colonial gentility, peeling walls and a once regal library withering away under dust and neglect, Darjeeling's delicately flavoured tea too faces a crisis.

It is being squeezed by low productivity, down from over 11 million lbs to around 20 million lbs a year, mounting labour expenses, up by 62 per cent, and production costs that are outstripping returns.

The collapse of its main market, the former Soviet Union, which bought nearly 50 per cent of Darjeeling's aromatic leaf tea, a steady drop in domestic consumption and a halt to increasing exports to Iraq due to the current unrest have all further imperilled the subtle Himalayan brew.

Extortion and killings by insurgent groups in tea plantations in neighbouring Assam state, another major tea region, have added to producers' expenses, which include security costs, medical care, housing, electricity, education and food rations for the workforce, all mandated by a 1951 law.

Consequently, 2.2 lbs of tea costs today around $1.62 (€1.40) to produce but sells for around $1 (€0.85). A majority of Darjeeling's 78 tea gardens, mostly located at a height of around 5,000 feet, sold their harvest last year for around half of what it cost to make.

"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," Sanjeev Seth, head of the Darjeeling Planters' Association, said.

He said tea requires a special biodiversity that has been destroyed. If this continued, all that would remain would be a collection of motley "bought-tea leaf" factories, supported by small growers with no commitment to either product quality or labour welfare, he added.

The region's woefully inadequate natural forest cover, plundered by politically connected "timber mafias", has exacerbated the slide in Darjeeling's 175-year tea industry by accelerating soil erosion in the rain-soaked hills at heights averaging 5,000 feet.

Deforestation has also resulted in reduced rainfall patterns in what was one of the world's wettest regions and landslides that threaten to engulf tea estates.

To add to the planters' woes across Bengal state, nearly 75 per cent of all tea bushes are over 80 years old, many either diseased or beyond their productivity period and badly in need of being replaced.

But most plantation owners - many of them rapacious traders with little or no experience of growing tea - are desperate for quick profits and opt for chemicals and other short-term means to enhance fertility rather than wait seven years for new bushes to become productive.

And though a handful of plantations have recently turned to organic gardening - 22 of 78 gardens in Darjeeling - and are attempting to rejuvenate the forest cover, the restoration process will takes decades.

Of Darjeeling's 78 estates - covering 17,000 hectares and employing around 90,000 people - seven have so far closed or operate erratically. In the neighbouring Dooars and Terai plains that produce a substantial proportion of India's 1.75 billion lbs of tea annually, another 20 have been abandoned.

Over the past two years, tens of thousands of tea-workers have been laid off in Bengal and Assam and in southern India's Nilgiri Hills, where the crisis is far worse. Following the closure of the Kathalguri tea estate in Jalpaiguri, 110 miles south-east of Darjeeling, around 8,000 workers were rendered jobless last year and since then at least nine have reportedly died of starvation.

Prabir Bhattacharya, of the Indian Tea Association, said additional gardens were likely to close this winter after plucking stopped in December, further increasing joblessness in a sector that employs over one million people, second only in its importance for the country to Indian Rail.

"The prognosis for the tea industry is grim," said J. S. Tarayal, who manages the estate producing the famous Lopchu brand of Darjeeling tea.

For the moment there seems to be little sign of light at the end of the tunnel, he added. The only hope for the industry is to recapture the Russian market and move into the US, where tea is increasingly being seen as a health drink.

Impractical legislation to realise the full value of Darjeeling teas has also contributed to the problem. Selling Darjeeling teas blended with inferior brands as Pure Darjeeling abroad led to India instituting protectionist measures like the certified trade mark. This followed revelations that though only 19.8 million lbs of Darjeeling tea were produced in 2000 over 880 million lbs were sold globally. Under certified trade mark regulations, only Darjeeling's gardens were recognised as bona fide producers of its leaf tea. But these measures ran into trouble when international tea cartels refused to open up their stocks for inspection by the Indian Tea Board, as CTM rules required them to.

"Many major European buyers were not ready to tolerate this and began promoting alternative teas from Nepal and high grade Ceylon that are close in flavour to Darjeeling tea and marketed them as such," a planter said.

With declining profits, standards of living on tea estates have undergone radical change.

"It's no longer a way of life. It's become a job," Mr Harsh Kumar, a planter for 30 years said.

The number of servants the burra sahibs (plantation managers) were allocated, for instance, had reduced by a third from around 30 per household, while entertainment, fuel and soft furnishing allowances had been drastically cut. Even the legendary Moog and Barua cooks from further east, who jealously guarded their vast culinary repertoire, had disappeared.

"Gardens are no longer run by managers but by accountants who know nothing about ground realities," one deprived Burra sahib said. Club life that centred on tennis, football and golf, the bar and parties, and was the core of tea life until the early 1990s, has almost been obliterated.

"Clubs are a sad shadow of what they once were," S. Mohankrishnan lamented, adding that driving 40 miles for dinner at one of them was routine some years ago, but no longer.

Many plantation mangers said the good days in tea were over and socialising no longer formed the mainstay of the sahib's life, having been supplanted by cable television, home movies and the Internet. Besides, the majority of new recruits into tea estates were from backgrounds vastly different from their predecessors and more concerned about getting ahead professionally than being social, club- or sports-minded.

"The old breed of planters, like the British and the Scots and the Indians who emulated them, played hard and worked hard," Vijay Parmar said. The new ones are too busy adjusting to changed times.