On the fringes of Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand, are located two adjacent tea gardens, Arcadia and Harbanswala, spread over 1,127 acres. This is the end of the plucking season that begins in March. In a couple of weeks, there will be no tender leaves left to pick. A couple of women are at work on the tea bushes. Inside the estate, there’s a dilapidated processing factory, though the machinery is fairly new. Over a dozen men and women are going through the paces: boiling, crushing, drying and packing (in unbranded gunny bags) the tea. The produce will be shipped to Amritsar, and then to Kashmir and even Pakistan. It is sold as organic tea, free of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
Clearly, the tea gardens have seen better days. Production this year is likely to be 30,000 to 35,000 kg, which is less than last year’s 50,000 kg, because there was no production in June and July, thanks to extreme dry weather. As a result, the turnover of the gardens could fall from Rs 28 lakh last year to Rs 20-Rs 25 lakh this year. Profits are a distant dream — the company is weighed down by losses of around Rs 1 crore. At the end of this financial year, the figure could be still higher. The gardens are the property of a company called DTC India which, in turn, is owned by Delhi-based real estate developer Loam Realtors (formerly known as Logical Buildwell).
The gardens are poorly maintained. The city is expanding rapidly (it is the favourite destination of all hillsmen who want to live the easy life in the plains of Dehradun), and the resultant environmental degradation has begun to take its toll on the gardens. Large tracts of the garden are on the outskirts of the city, but some upscale colonies (Vasant Vihar and Indira Nagar) have come up close to it. Cattle can often be seen grazing here, while the weeds are strangulating the tea bushes. Two decades ago, the Indian Military Academy (IMA), the training centre for army officers, was given a large chunk of Arcadia, which considerably shrunk tea production. There are reports that IMA wants to acquire more land in the gardens now. Then, some years back, the Uttarakhand government built roads inside Aracadia under local political pressure. The government is silent on the issue. “We can’t do much in the tea gardens,” says Uttarakhand Chief Secretary Alok Kumar Jain.
The gardens, and several others in the hills of Uttarakhand, go back to the second half of the 19th century. The climate, the argument went, was similar to that of Darjeeling, and therefore tea could be cultivated successfully here as well. Tea saplings were transported from Assam and even China. Some enterprising Britons took the lead and set up tea gardens up in the hills, and even got inexpensive workers from China to help. (Some of those bushes still survive, so do some factories and old Chinese families.) In 1860, the North West Frontier Tea Company came up. In 1863, it was renamed Dehradun Tea Company — now shortened to DTC. The tea experiment wasn’t universally successful. While a similar experiment in Kangra worked, the Uttarakhand experience was patchy. Several tea gardens were abandoned in the first half of the 20th century. (The Uttarakhand government, some years back, initiated a tea project in several villages. So, tea cultivation in the hills has revived.) But Dehradun was successful. At its peak, DTC owned over 40 gardens. “That was the time when we used to get best pay package,” said Hem Bahadur, who has been working since 1950s.
But all that is a far cry now. From 5,000 acres at their peak, the gardens are now down to less than a fourth in size. “We don’t know what lies ahead as far as these two gardens are concerned. But tea cultivation in Dehradun has no future,” said S P Chaurasia, a former chairman of the company. There appears to be no hope of a turnaround. “We will continue to suffer losses this year also,” rues D K Singh, the company secretary who sits in colonial bungalow called Midford House not far from the tea gardens. There isn’t enough money to replace the old bushes. A tea bush has a productive life span of 40 to 45 years. “You can’t flog a dying horse anymore. These saplings which were planted by the British have crossed their age,” says Chaurasia.
What stops the owner, Loam Realtors, from shutting the gardens and developing the real estate? Singh says that the land use of the gardens cannot be changed because any such attempt would bring the gardens under the ambit of the Land Ceiling Act where the owner cannot keep more than 12 acres of irrigated land and 18 acres of non-irrigated land. The previous Congress government of Uttarakhand, under Narayan Dutt Tiwari, wanted to build a housing colony here but the efforts came to naught. “These gardens have been left to die their natural death,” rues Anil P Joshi, an environmentalist.
