Almost half of Darjeeling’s tea gardens face bankruptcy, and the rest are haemorrhaging cash. How have things got so bad for the industry? We explain:
tea estates in Darjeeling, a hill station in West Bengal straddling India’s border with Nepal, will carry out the final full-moon harvest of the year. Illuminated by fire-lit torches and moonlight, pickers will collect leaves and buds for a special white tea. They believe that the planetary alignment during a full moon ensures a perfect harvest.
The estates were created in the 19th century by the British Raj, which was desperate to reduce its dependence on Chinese tea. They were sold to Indian families after independence. Now tea growers in the region worry that trouble is brewing. Almost half of Darjeeling’s tea gardens face bankruptcy, and the rest are haemorrhaging cash.
Growers face two big problems. First, cheaper teas from Nepal have lured away customers. The state of West Bengal enforces stricter worker protections and minimum wages for tea pickers than Nepal does. As a result, production costs are considerably higher. Since 2017, when region-wide strikes in Darjeeling caused tea production to plummet briefly, inferior tea from Nepal has been illegally sold as Darjeeling at rock-bottom prices, according to an Indian parliamentary report.
Darjeeling tea is supposed to be protected by a geographic indication tag: it must be grown in the Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts of West Bengal at an elevation of between 600 and 2000 metres. Only 87 of India’s tea gardens are licensed to produce the stuff. The Indian government wants to step up checks at the porous Nepalese border to ensure that Darjeeling-labelled packages actually contain pure Darjeeling tea. But geopolitics complicates enforcement.
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