Luxmi Group, a tea company that owns 25 gardens both in India and abroad, including their flagship Makaibari tea garden in Darjeeling, has decided to donate a part of their sales to a martyrs’ corpus fund.
The announcement comes at a time when the situation is volatile between India and Pakistan.
Sources in the company said that 10 per cent of the company’s tea sales in May would be donated to the Bharat Ke Veer corpus.
The fund for paramilitary martyrs is supported by the Union home ministry and managed by a committee of “eminent persons of repute and senior government officials", according to the Bharat Ke Veer website.
Luxmi Group owns 25 tea estates across the world, including Makaibari in Darjeeling and Fulbari in the Terai in Bengal. It also has 12 estates in Assam, six in Tripura and four in Rwanda, East Africa.
“The group produces 30 million kilos of tea annually,” a company official said.
In 1912, during British colonial rule, P.C. Chatterjee, a freedom fighter, planted the seeds of what would become Luxmi Tea in Tripura.
Taking on the might of the British empire, Chatterjee set up an Indian-grown, Indian-owned tea enterprise as a symbol of self-reliance.
Rudra Chatterjee, managing director of Luxmi Group, emphasised: “Luxmi Tea was born during the freedom struggle, and our brave soldiers uphold that freedom every day. Supporting our Bharat Ke Veer is a small contribution to those who serve and protect the country. We are humbled by their sacrifice.”
The group’s Makaibari garden has made waves globally.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in 2016, he gifted her a packet of Makaibari tea.
The brew from Makaibari was also served to participants and staff of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.