Other States - Assam   

A role model for small tea growers

Guwahati: Three years ago when she qualified as a graduate in Tea Technology from Assam Agriculture University, Shariti C. Syiem decided to help her father with her knowhow to improve the quality of orthodox tea produced in their small family garden at Sohryngkham village in Meghalaya’s East Khasi Hills district.

The technological inputs helped a lot and Shariti is now selling about 100 kg of orthodox tea grown on Sharawan Estate, located at 5,333 feet above the sea level, to buyers in Australia at Rs 800 a kg. Her father John Marbaninag set up this small tea garden in 1993. However, he had no knowledge of how pruning could help in enhancing yield and quality.

“I helped my father do pruning of tea bushes. Earlier, he used to do plucking without pruning. If pruning is not done, yield will go down. It helped to increase productivity and quality and fetch higher prices,” she told The Hindu.

Her father, a product of Don Bosco Technical School, Shillong, has also set up a small processing factory in the tea garden. He has sold 13 small processing machines to small tea growers in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya. Now, while Shariti looks after the garden and manufacturing, her father takes orders from small growers for processing machines.

Sixty-year-old Marbaninag recalls that he started with 600 tea plants cloned from the Darjeeling variety in 1993 and after waiting for three years manufactured three-four kg of tea initially.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

A role model for small tea growers

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu