Who Grows Nilgiri Tea? Smallholders, Estate Workers and the People of the Blue Mountains

A 2016 count put the area under tea at 66,175 hectares, producing 135 million kg a year, and one report found that only 30 percent of it came from large plantations; the rest was grown by smallholders, most of them local Badaga farmers with less than a hectare each, who sell their leaf to “bought leaf” factories. A bought-leaf factory is a standalone tea factory with no garden of its own, and their number grew along with the number of small growers.

The Badagas: from millet to tea

The Badagas, whose name means “northerners,” are the largest indigenous community in the Nilgiris. After World War I they moved from their traditional millet to potatoes and, by 1920, to tea, and today “more than 80% of the community still remains connected to tea,” across some 370 Badaga villages. Drive around the hills and you see their hamlets, called hattis, nestling on slopes surrounded by tea, with women working among the bushes and in the potato and cabbage fields.

Why the small farms chose tea

Cherian P. Matthew, a third-generation planter, told us why the small growers moved to tea. Coffee is harvested once a year, but tea runs on “a weekly cycle. So the small growers were able to get money every week.” Coffee estates also needed a big workforce only at harvest, while a tea estate has work all year round. How coffee gave way to tea across the hills is told in The history of Nilgiri tea.

A cooperative for small growers

Small growers also have INDCO, the Nilgiri-based federation that our founder called India’s largest tea cooperative, set up to help them with processing, distribution and trading. In 2021 it caused a stir by offering its growers procurement rates higher than the Tea Board’s, and, as our founder noted, it was “not the first or only time.”

Workers from eastern and northeastern India, about 50,000 by a 2016 estimate, now fill jobs once held by Tamil families whose children have moved to the cities: see The Changing Face of Tea Gardens in the Nilgiris.

The people behind the numbers

Our 2016 story met some of them.

• Sunil Gurung: came from Alipurduar in West Bengal, by way of building sites around Delhi and work in Kerala, to Devashola estate, which gives free housing and health care; those were what made him bring his family south.
• Chilo: left her family’s small farm in Jharkhand in 2009 to work at Craigmore, where her husband works too; she visits home once a year.
• Mangu Oran: a tea roller at Craigmore’s Woodlands factory, also from Jharkhand, who hopes to stay until he retires.

Wages were part of the pull. In 2016 the Nilgiris Settlement Wage was Rs 241 a day, which Balaji Rao, managing director of Devashola, told us was “double of what is paid in West Bengal.”

What our buyer saw

Our tea buyer noticed the change on his 2016 visit: fewer locals and more workers from Odisha, Bengal, Assam, Jharkhand and Nepal. One man told him his great-grandfather had come from western Nepal; at Glendale the gatekeeper was Nepali, and was so pleased to hear that our buyer’s own forefathers came from Nepal that he rushed to bring his father to meet him. At Parkside, a worker was surprised to meet a Hindi-speaking visitor. Both told him they were happy with their living and working conditions.

Where the Tamil families went

By the mid-1980s, the educated children of Tamil estate workers were leaving for blue-collar jobs in nearby cities, and later for jobs in information technology. Their places in the estate “lines” were filled by workers from the east and northeast. At TANTEA, the Tamil Nadu government’s tea corporation, most workers are still local Tamils or descendants of the Tamil families resettled from Sri Lanka in 1968.

“Unlike Darjeeling and even Assam, the Nilgiris tea estates run a highly mechanized and efficient set-up,” our buyer wrote in 2016, and he saw “greater efficiency, an adherence to safety norms, and an overall higher quality of working” in the estates around Coonoor.

Laws, and estates that keep their word

Worker welfare on the Nilgiri estates goes back to the 1930s, when many companies began providing water, electricity, roads, drainage and health care. The Minimum Wages Act of 1948 and the Plantation Labour Act of 1951 added drinking water, crèches, medical care, housing and maternity benefits by law, and a senior planter told us that though these rules are pan-Indian, “in Tamil Nadu they are actually enforced.”

Our buyer also found that estate managers kept their promises. At Glendale, the school and crèche that management had promised to renovate on his previous visit were done by January 2016, and concrete block bricks had replaced tar on some roads so the soil could hold the water. Many plantations had started growing herbs and peppers in empty patches.

Shears and hands

Mechanization shows in the fields. At TANTEA the everyday crop, mostly CTC, is harvested with shears, “not the delicate hand plucking of two leaves and a bud,” which is kept for the specialty silver needle. Even the small things are steady: at the Adderley post office, we met Anitha, the postwoman, and learned that tea workers trust the India Post savings schemes because they are government run and seen as secure.

The Coonoor Club has been the planters’ hangout since 1885, and most evenings the talk is about tea, the weather and green-leaf prices. The planters there today “are not English, Irish or Scottish; they are Tamil, Badaga, Kannada, Malayalee, Gujarati and Sikh.”

On estates, managers are still called “dorais” and their assistants “chinna dorais,” and many of the old bungalows have become homestays. Our buyer stayed in some of the best colonial bungalows in the country on his 2016 trip, and called the one at Craigmore “the best bungalow I have ever stayed in, across the country.” For life in the hills beyond the tea, read That Nilgiris Bubble.