How handcrafted tea is changing Kaziranga women's lives

Mint

2 days ago

When Meena Tokbipi, living less than one kilometre from Kaziranga National Park's (KNP) Kohora Range in Assam, planted tea saplings in her backyard for the first time in 2004, all she wanted was to grow enough for her family.
Cut to 2025, the resident of Engle Pathar, a small village in the Karbi Anglong district, has carved a niche for herself as a proponent of Sa Tokbe—the traditional Karbi green tea, selling green tea at ₹ 3,000 per kilogramme.
She also grows black tea (sold at ₹ 3,000/kg), orthodox tea ( ₹ 3,000/kg), and smoked tea ( ₹ 1,600-2,000/kg) in her 7.5 hectare tea garden, which produces 3 quintal tea per week during peak season, i.e, monsoon (June-July).
"I decided to start a tea garden in my home in 2002. I plucked tea leaves for the first time in 2009. At that time, after keeping a portion of the produce for the consumption of the family, I sold the tea leaves to middlemen at a nominal price,' the 51-year-old told Mint.
The price offered by middlemen fluctuated, from ₹ 30/kg for raw tea leaves to as low as ₹ 10/kg. 'This system continued for a decade. We were somehow managing but not making much profit,' she added.
Things changed in 2020 when she participated in a training programme on how to make handcrafted tea, organised by the conservation non-profit Aaranyak.
Nineteen Karbi women from 10 villages around KNP participated in the programme. However, only four women from three villages—Engle Pathar, Rongtara, and Bakrung Engti—are actively preparing handcrafted tea. PIRBI store at the Kohora Range within Kaziranga National Park.
Aaranyak's initiative, PIRBI, a community business selling naturally grown products that supports Indigenous farmers in the region, is marketing, branding, and selling their products.
PIRBI, meaning biosphere in the Karbi language, showcases and sells Karbi ethnic products, such as edibles, handwoven garments, handicrafts, etc., at its store near the main gate of the Kohora Range.
The initiative is helping women living in the fringe villages of KNP become self-reliant, said Swapan Nath, the acting treasurer of PIRBI. 'In many of these families, the males don't earn much, and so the burden of running the family falls on the women. The women here are very skilled in making various kinds of products, which attract tourists and walk-in customers—people who stop at our store while visiting the national park.'
'PIRBI contributes 12% of its profit to biodiversity conservation and community development. It shares 5% of the profit with the artisans, growers, and collectors,' explained Nath, who is also an independent journalist and a headmaster at a local school.
Tokbipi neither belongs to a tea grower family nor is she from Kaziranga. She hails from a Bodo-Kachari family in Biswanath district's Gohpur town. She married Chandra Tokbipi, a Karbi man working at a tea garden in Behali.
Their lives changed in 1989 when Assamese and Bodos got involved in a deadly strife in Gohpur. Karbis were caught in the crossfire in the incident that killed 31 and rendered thousands homeless. Meena Tokbipi.
'In 1990, we decided to leave Gohpur. My husband had an aunt in Karbi Anglong, where we initially took shelter. Later, we went to Bagori in Kaziranga and stayed there for five years. In 1996, we settled in Engle Pathar,' she said.
Kaziranga was a harsh landscape, but they slowly adapted.
Before her tea business took off, her family had to fight abject poverty. Her husband did odd jobs while she sold products like betel nut and homemade pickles. Things got worse when she lost her husband in a 2011 road accident.
Today, she employs five women from her village as pluckers for ₹ 200 each daily. 'As the pluckers working in my garden are not highly trained, they can pluck only 15-18 kg daily. Professional pluckers working in big tea gardens can pluck up to 30 kg daily. To manufacture one kilogramme of handcrafted tea, we need four kilogrammes of raw tea leaves,' said.
'After plucking the tea, the leaves are thrown in boiling water for 5-10 seconds. The boiled leaves are rolled by hand and dried. It takes two sunny days to get the best taste, flavour, aroma, and colour. For perfect green tea, the buds have to turn white and the leaves dark,' Tokbipi explained.
Her eldest daughter, Moina Kramsapi (33), a Tezpur Law College graduate, has also become an entrepreneur by turning a portion of her mother's tea garden into an eco-camp named Kramsa Rock Garden.
'I started the eco-camp in 2019. We have a pond with an area of two and a half bighas where we provide our guests the facility of angling for ₹ 50 per hour. We also arrange two trails: a two-hour trek from the camp to a natural rock cave and a half-day trek. We have both English and Assamese/Hindi speaking guides,' she said.
Sika Terangpi and her sister-in-law Rukmini from the Rongtara village dealt with a different set of challenges.
Before growing tea, their family practised Jhum cultivation, growing crops like king chilli, sweet potato, banana flower, etc. Still, the family led a hand-to-mouth existence.
'After we started growing green tea, our income has increased. We have a small garden, and we are using it entirely to make handcrafted tea. We don't sell tender tea leaves to agents,' Sika said.
However, the lack of roads and communication bottlenecks make lives challenging for them. 'There is no motorable road up to our village. It takes around 2.5 hours to walk from the main road in Kohora to reach our village. Phone connectivity is also poor in our village. We have to go down to the plains for every essential work, be it selling our farm produce or obtaining cooking gas,' she added.
They couldn't afford to employ pluckers, so they do the plucking, processing, and tea making themselves. Rukmini, a single mother, is financing the education of her three children with the money earned from the tea garden.
Not many small tea growers produce handcrafted tea in Assam, according to Bhogeswari Changmai, one of the first people in the state to start making handcrafted tea. While there are 122,415 small tea growers in the state, according to the recent Tea Board of India data, only about 120 people make handcrafted tea, claimed Changmai.
The organic, handcrafted tea is popular because of its health benefits, said Changmai, who was awarded 'Entrepreneur of the Year' by the Assam government in 2021 and has exported her products to Taiwan, Dubai, and Belgium. 'It contains antioxidants, and it has got a lot of health benefits like lowering the risk of cancer and heart disease and boosting the immune system.'
Though there is demand for handcrafted tea, only a few have been successful in creating a brand, added Dipanjol Deka, secretary, Tea Association of India. 'Also, this tea is mainly consumed by the elite, as everyone can't afford it. Here, common people drink red tea or what we call laal saah in our colloquial language. In the northern and western parts of India, people prefer milk tea. So, producing handcrafted tea is not of much use unless the middle class and the working class start consuming it.'
'Handcrafted tea is yet to reach its real potential. They should be taken to niche markets around the world with a proper marketing strategy,' said researcher Pradip Baruah, who has penned seven books on tea.
However, Nath said success stories of women like Tokbipi and Terangpi may inspire more Karbi women to start making handcrafted tea. 'They can turn entrepreneurs and establish a new identity for themselves with the help of handcrafted tea."