The Tea Board has intercepted at a Darjeeling garden a consignment of tea leaves and green leaves from the Terai region, bolstering the longstanding suspicion that tea produced outside is being passed off to consumers as the GI-tagged Darjeeling tea.
When Tea Board officials made a surprise visit to Darjeeling’s Gayabaree & Millikthong tea estate on Saturday, they found leaves plucked from the Terai-based Panighatta tea estate being processed at the factory there.
Only 87 gardens in the Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts can legally claim to be cultivating and marketing Darjeeling tea, which in 2004 became the first Indian product to earn the GI tag.
Officials of the Tea Board, which functions under the Union commerce ministry, found at the factory that green leaf produced at the Terai garden was being processed into orthodox black tea, which is usually how Darjeeling tea is produced and sold.
They also found green leaves from Panighatta that were yet to be processed.
“This is a violation of the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999, and amounts to an attempt to misrepresent non-GI-origin tea as Darjeeling tea, which is a GI-marked product,” a source in the Tea Board told The Telegraph on Monday.
“We have told the garden management to immediately cease any further procurement and processing of green tea leaves from non-GI regions and refrain from marketing and labelling the processed tea as Darjeeling tea.”
The Tea Board has asked the Gayabaree garden management to explain its conduct, failing which the government body can take further action under laws such as the Tea (Marketing) Control Order. Green leaves from outside cannot be legally brought into territory protected under the GI law.
Sheo Bagaria, who owns the Gayabaree and Panighatta tea estates, denied any wrongdoing.
“This is a false allegation; we have done nothing wrong,” he told this newspaper. He confirmed the Saturday visit by Tea Board officials.
Late on Monday evening, Tea Board sources said the Gayabaree tea estate manager had admitted to green leaf from Panighatta being processed into black tea at Gayabaree but requested that no action be taken.
The garden has promised to send the processed tea (orthodox black tea) back to Panighatta and sell the green leaves to “bought leaf” factories, the sources added.
The manager told the Tea Board that the group had taken over Panighatta, which had been closed for 10 years, much to the joy of its 700 workers and their families. On entering the garden, the garden management found local people illegally plucking leaves.
Workers resume their duties at the Pandam Tea Garden in Darjeeling on Sunday.
The manager purportedly added that the Panighatta tea factory was under the seal of the high court-appointed receiver, implying this was why the green leaves were sent for processing to nearby Gayabaree, which has the same ownership.
Darjeeling’s gardens, barring a handful, have never quite recovered from the 104-day general strike in 2017 that crippled the hill economy.
Despite production hitting new all-time lows every year – it sunk to 5.6 million kilograms in 2024 from 6.01mkg in 2023 – the garden owners often complained of a lack of demand and consequent low prices.
This is partly because of the influx of Nepal tea, which is often sold as Darjeeling tea or is blended with Darjeeling tea in Bengal.
There has also been suspicion that tea from nearby regions is being blended with Darjeeling tea. Therefore, higher volumes of “Darjeeling tea” sells than is produced by the 87 GI-tagged gardens.
This was the situation even before Darjeeling tea received GI recognition. To avoid the scanner, some retailers and packeters now sell Darjeeling tea mixed with the produce of other regions as “Himalayan blend”.