NORTH EAST: Manu Valley tea estate in Tripura now exports tea

FROM THE HINDU

NEWS SHARED BY AARDEE

Kailasahar (PTI): The once sick Manu Valley tea estate here has turned the corner, exporting a huge quantity of its produce to England, Iran and Uzbekistan and enjoying the third position in the Kolkata tea auction.

What has brought about this success? The general manager of the estate, G C Das, thinks it were mosquito nets.

He said when they purchased the estate in 1981, it was plagued by large-scale absenteeism as majority of its workers were most of the time down with Malaria which claims hundreds of lives in Tripura every year.

“We just distributed mosquito nets to overcome the problem and over time the production capacity rose from just 80,000 kg to present 24.57 lakh kg annually.”

The area under cultivation had also increased from 150 hectares to 200 hectares now, Das said.

On the export front, he said last year one lakh kg of tea produced in the estate was exported to the UK while 30,000 kg of tea was exported to Iran.

He said the Manu Valley tea fetches the highest price in the state and is presently third in the Kolkata tea auction.

Mr. Das said this year the tea market was doing well following crop failure in Kenya and ethnic violence in Sri Lanka.

“The price of a kg of tea at the Kolkata and Guwahati auctions stands at Rs 120-125 whereas it was only Rs 85-90 last year,” the assistant manager, Prabir Dey, said.

Asked how it was doing good business at a time of global meltdown, Das said, “We are focussing on quality, cost effectiveness and adoption of modern technology.”

The garden management, he said, had bought 20 plucking machines from Japan to offset the chronic shortage of labourers and in 2005 had installed sophisticated Fluid Bed Dryer that has a capacity of producing 600 kg per hour that helped to increase the overall production.

Mr. Das expressed concern over many labourers quitting the tea estate as they were getting better wages for work done under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

On the use of plucking machines, he said the company was virtually compelled to buy them due to acute shortage of labourers.