Acknowledging the significant contribution of small tea growers (STGs) towards the state’s tea industry, Assam government pledged to do its bit for the welfare and uplift of this vast unorganised sector by creating a corpus.
It demanded a separate directorate of the Tea Board in Guwahati for STGs and said “will compel” Tea Board to look into the issues pertaining to STGs and “extend full cooperation” to them.
The ‘green leaf cess’ collected from STGs from now will be used to fund the special corpus, which will be utilised for welfare of STGs and associated tea labourers," said Assam’s industry minister Pradyut Bordoloi while releasing a ‘data bank’ on STGs, which is a first such initiative for gauging STGs in the state.
Advocating the cause of STGs, a visibly angry chief minister Tarun Gogoi said, “We will not tolerate that Tea Board will look only the big tea growers. We want inclusive growth. Tea Board will have to extend full cooperation or we will compel them to do so.”
The ‘date bank’ found 68,465 STGs in Assam and they contribute nearly 25 per cent of the total tea produced in the state. Nearly, 5 lakh families in Assam are associated with small scale tea cultivation.
Bordoloi said that since the government had never taken any major scheme for the welfare of the STGs and associated labourers, it decided to form the special fund to address issues of this vast unorganised sector.
Furthermore, at least 35 per cent of the fund will be spent on the welfare of tea labourers associated with STGs, as they too are deprived of almost all benefits that their counterparts get in the organised sector.
The fund will help finance STGs to get “orientations and trainings to imbibe the best practices” at Tocklai Tea Research Association, which till date has been an exclusive privilege of the organised sector.
“Assam has been witnessing a silent revolution for the past 15 years as more and more people were taking up tea cultivation. Today, rural unemployment has almost ended in most of the Upper Assam districts as tea cultivation gave the people a new avenue to earn livelihood,” said Bordoloi.
“When I joined as minister, no one could give my any definite figure pertaining to STGs in the state. That was a grey area. After this survey, now I can confirm that Assam contributes 55 per cent of the total tea produced in the country,” Bordoloi said. A sizeable number of small tea growers, especially in Upper Assam, have taken up tea cultivation during the past 15 years.
According to the ‘data bank’, the total land under tea cultivation of small growers is 117 thousand acres. It found that there is shift from paddy to tea cultivation in high lands in Upper Assam.
It found that 59,717 small tea gardens have the holding size of less than 3 acres, that is 87 per cent of the small tea growers in the state are small farmers. Small tea growers produced around 400 million kgs of green leaf in 2008 and it is expected to touch 500 million kgs in the coming years.
