Darjeeling, March 26: The disintegration of the USSR had triggered one of the biggest slumps in the history of the Darjeeling Tea industry in the early 1990s, but concrete efforts by stakeholders here promise a “golden decade”.

Private entrepreneurs have in the past four years ploughed in nearly Rs 100 crore in the industry. Much of the investment has come because of a change of management, which has improved marketing strategies to ensure expected returns.

“In the past three years, almost one third of the gardens (there are around 70 different owners for the 87 gardens registered as producing Darjeeling Tea) changed hands. Most of the sick gardens in Darjeeling have been bought and there has been a change in fortune,” said Sanjay Bansal, chairman, Darjeeling Planters’ Association (DPA).

Apart from Pubung, none of the other gardens in the hills have shut shop unlike in the Dooars where 13 estates are still closed.

“Earlier, producers did not really cultivate or explore other markets because of the USSR where even tea dust from Darjeeling would be grabbed,” said Sandeep Mukherjee, the secretary of the DPA. Now, the export to Russia is not much, but almost 60-65 per cent of the branded tea goes out of the country, said Mukherjee. According to Bansal, the prospects have been improving since 2001.

“The next couple of years promise much and we believe that we are entering the golden decade of the industry,” he said. Bansal himself has bought 10 sick gardens. “We took over estates like Sephoydhura, Chongtung and Happy Valley, which were all sick,” said Bansal.

A change of management entails an investment of at least Rs 4-5 crore. “After taking over Happy Valley, we ploughed in about Rs 3 crore to pay the debts for statutory benefits (like PF) of the workers,” said Bansal.

With the new markets preferring organic tea, the number of organic gardens, too, have risen. But organic conversion takes almost about three to four years and a garden usually suffers about 25 per cent crop loss. However with investments made in recent times, the total amount of produce remained 9.5 million kg of made tea each year.

The Geographical Indicator (GI) patent, too, was a major achievement. Earlier in the absence of a GI, almost 40 million kg was sold in the global market as Darjeeling Tea. Since 2004-05, only brew sold by the 87 registered gardens is considered Darjeeling Tea. This helped control quality as well as churn out profits.