A Bitter Brew for India’s Tea Industry
There is a desperate edge to Vijay Singh’s optimism as he racks his brain for some marketing miracle to rescue Indian tea. What about getting Americans to drink it?
They’re a health-conscious lot, the plantation boss reasons, and tea -- why it’s practically a medicine, he proclaims.
India is the world’s largest producer of tea -- more than 1.75 billion pounds a year. With more than a million workers, the tea business is the nation’s second-biggest employer after railways, but the industry is in its worst crisis.
It is being squeezed by cheap foreign competitors, the collapse of its main market -- the former Soviet Union -- and high production costs. Producers thought that they had a way to check the industry’s slide last year, when they increased exports to Iraq, but the war there dashed those efforts.
Extortion by bandits and militants adds to producers’ expenses, which include security costs, as well as the medical care, education and food rations for the work force that were mandated by a 1951 law.
The result: It costs $1.50 to produce a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of Indian tea, which sells for about $1.
Tens of thousands of workers have been laid off in Assam state, the heart of the country’s tea industry, and elsewhere in India. Last summer, after the closure of the Kathalguri tea estate in Jalpaiguri, south of the border with Bhutan, 8,000 workers were laid off. At least nine workers there died of starvation, according to a Times of India report; tea employees said that the number was 130.
“This used to be a very good job when I was young,” Singh, who started out in the industry 24 years ago, says mournfully. Now he is the boss of the Chandighat Tea Estate in the Cachar district of Assam, not far from Silchar.
The job has become miserably unsafe. Three tea estate managers have been killed by workers in the last two months, one hacked to death for sacking three workers. Then there’s kidnapping: A plantation chief in a district neighboring Singh’s was seized for ransom last month. Although the lynchings are typically carried out by workers, the kidnappings and extortion are usually blamed on local militants and bandits.
Before the sun dips over Assam’s tea-studded hills, monsoon clouds glow with an incandescent silver lining. In Singh’s elegant white bungalow, built by the British nearly 120 years ago, the ceiling fan spins lazily, sweeping visitors back to the era of the British colonials, who brought tea to India.
Singh speaks in the clipped English that seems preserved in a bottle from that bygone era.
“Babool!” he shouts to his servant, who scurries with trays bearing crumbed potato croquettes, English-style biscuits, densely sweet Indian confections like clouds of cotton -- and deliciously strong Assam tea.
It’s not the “quick cup of tea” Singh promised, but in India, such a thing does not exist.
For years, the Soviet Union provided a ready market for Indian growers’ leaves, and Moscow often swapped military equipment for tea. But when the bloc fell apart, the tea market also collapsed, and nowadays in Russia, coffee is gaining market share.
Singh says that because of the Soviet market, the Indian industry had felt that it did not need to worry about being efficient.
India’s producers never recovered when that market collapsed, and countries such as Kenya and Sri Lanka started producing cheaper tea.
With a billion people, India’s domestic market could provide an answer, but demand is stagnant. Indians drink less tea per capita than the British or Pakistanis. The 118-year-old Chandighat tea plantation will soon have to start laying off some of its 890 workers, Singh says. In Assam, 10 estates have closed, and in neighboring Dooars, 20 have shut down. Plantation managers predict ensuing violence and unrest from workers as they try to cut costs, removing benefits such as food rations.
At the Chandighat estate, workers wait near the gates, their clothing like bright flags against the green hills. A sharp smell of tea leaves emanates from the nearby factory, like the steam from a hot pot of the drink.
Arun Singh, 39, was born on the Chandighat plantation, and three generations of his family worked on the estate.
“When I started off in the industry, it was in good shape,” says Singh, who worked his way up from factory worker to supervisor.
If there are layoffs, “quite naturally the workers won’t accept it. We don’t have land. Our whole life depends on tea. If this fails, we are doomed,” says Singh, who is not related to his boss. “The workers from the gardens which closed are dying. They are starving.”
He opposes mechanization, which would lead to job cuts, and calls for increased exports. But to where?
The ideal market, says Vijay Singh, would be the U.S., if Americans could just be persuaded to drink it. Preferably strong.
He knits his brow pondering the American predilection for sweet, flavored, ready-made iced tea drinks.
“To make a good cup of tea takes time,” he says. And though he’s reluctant to criticize tea bags, acknowledging their convenience, he says they never produce a great cup because they contain inferior pekoe dust, not flavorful whole leaves.
“Tea is made to be drunk in a pot. It takes time. The thing is, do Americans have that sort of time? Because everyone’s in a hurry.
“We could educate them,” he says. “In every packet we could put a leaflet explaining how to make a good cup of tea.” But he seems more wistful than optimistic, and with good reason.
Eighty percent of the tea Americans drink is iced. American tea consumption has been gradually growing, but at about 33,000 tons in 2002, it was dwarfed by coffee consumption -- more than 710,000 tons.
Critics of the Indian tea business, including state officials, say the industry’s desperate flailing to become more efficient and find new markets may have come too late.
“I warned them two years ago the situation was bad and would not improve immediately,” says Assam state’s chief minister, Tarun Gogoi, whose government will have to grapple with the social costs of layoffs. “They did not take it seriously. They thought it was just a cycle.”
