White tea from Dooars

White tea produced by the garden

Anirban Choudhury, TT, Feb 26, 2018 Alipurduar: A Dooars tea garden has for the first time produced white tea and the garden management has decided to convert the estate completely to organic, sources said.

The Radharani Tea Estate is situated in the Kalchini Block of Alipurduar and has 300 permanent workers. The garden is spread over 158 hectare.

"We have manufactured little amount of white tea last year which we sold at the Dooars Utsav at Rs. 8,000 per kg. We are the only garden producing white tea," Jitu Saikia, manager of Radharani Tea Estate, said.

In 2015, a new company took over the charge of the garden and they decided to produce green tea and orthodox tea, as the market price of this kind of tea is much higher than the CTC.

The decision was taken as the management found it difficult to run the garden with 300 workers, as the cost of CTC tea was cheaper.

In the same year, the company applied a license for organic garden.

In 2016, the garden produced green tea and it was exported to Colombo. But they could not write organic tea on the packets as they did not had organic licence then.

Saikia said: "We took over the charge of the garden in 2015. In the last two years we have produced orthodox tea and green tea. Along with it we also produced minimum quantity of white tea on experimental basis. Our garden is very small and without manufacturing organic trees it is not possible to bear the cost of 300 families (workers). Our wage and ration is cleared. We are the only garden going to be organic this year. In June, the final inspection will be done although we have received the provisional license."