Tea getting help from abroad!
The Indian tea industry seems to be caught in a bind. Scarcity of rains from October to March is causing a lot of hardship, with existing output dwindling due to much lower harvest and replantation of new tea also coming under threat. Tea production, till mid-March in Assam Valley, Cachar, Dooars and Terai was production of tea in Assam Valley, Cachar, Dooars and Terai was already down by 5.85 million kilos (YoY).
This is not a new happening. We might have taken giant strides in terms of technological progress but remain hostage to vagaries of monsoon. After years of suffering, the tea industry seems to have found a solution – all the way from Israel. Netafim is a water management company and its water management techniques seem to have the ability to address most of issues – global warming, growing threats of drought, decreasing yields from non-irrigated tea fields, high drought sensitivity of new high yield clonal tea varieties, large fluctuations in annual tea production and inefficient and outdated irrigation systems. It uses drip irrigation and its results are already showing in Tanzania. Three years after using Netafim, the tea farms there have reported I rrigation uniformity and efficiency of 90 - 95% and reported tea clone 6/8 yield - 60% higher than with conventional overhead sprinklers. Clone BBT133 yield increased by 40%. More importantly, labour cost, which eats away the maximum of topline, can also come down – in Tanzania, its Nutrigation™ drip irrigation program brought down labour costs by 50% in comparison with a conventional sprinkler system.
The Indian Tea Association has picked ten gardens located in North Bengal, Cachar and Brahmaputra Valley for a comprehensive water management programme on trial basis. This is to be funded by Solidaridad, an NGO. And if there is a noticeable change in these ten gardens, the program will be extended to others too. Could not help but wonder why our very own Jain Irrigation, which is a market leader in drip irrigation could not help the Indian tea industry and we had to depend on a foreign country?