A tea garden

Sonari, Oct. 24: The premier tea zones of Assam are still floundering in the international market though the industry?s fortunes have finally started looking up.

Sonari, located in Sivasagar district of Upper Assam, has always been recognised as a ?premium tea belt? along with Doom Dooma in Tinsukia district.

Of late, however, the quality of tea produced in 29 gardens in the Sonari belt has deteriorated sharply. Even its prospects in markets abroad have been affected.

This is being attributed by industry sources to inadequate and irregular supply of gas to tea factories by the Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL) and the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd (ONGC).

?Irregular supply of gas had severely affected our production quality. As a result, we are losing out to strong opponents in the international markets,? a garden manager complained at a meeting convened by Sivasagar deputy commissioner A.K. Dwivedi recently at Sivasagar. Other managers echoed him.

Apart from the tea industry, representatives from GAIL, ONGC, the Assam Gas Company Ltd (AGCL) and the Assam State Electricity Board (ASEB) attended the meeting, which was chaired by the deputy commissioner.

GAIL had entered into an agreement with the Sonari tea gas grid to supply 60,000 standard cubic metres of gas at a pressure of 4.5 kg daily to the tea gardens in the Charaideo subdivision.

However, the garden managements alleged that GAIL frequently deviates from this agreement.

?The gas supply is often reduced for one reason or the other. This is having a serious impact on production quality,? a garden manager alleged. He also claimed that all 29 gardens had been forced to waste nearly 10 lakh kg of green leaf due to the paucity of gas.

The fortunes of the state?s tea industry, after a crisis of nearly six years, have been looking up, with good prices being fetched in international as well as domestic markets.

The industry even weathered the bonus brouhaha unscathed this time, though Puja festivities in the gardens have been a pale shadow of those in normal years, thanks to the law and order situation in the state.

Fearing militant strikes, most garden managements had suspended screening of Hindi movies during the Pujas.

Though conceding that ?sometimes we have to cut down on the gas supply?, ONGC executive director and asset manager A.C. Upadhaya blamed this on the ageing fields.

?Most of them are around 35 years old. This is why production cannot be augmented,? he said.

However, the deputy commissioner issued strict instructions to GAIL to clarify its stand regarding gas supply and asked AGCL to ensure supplies till December at least, when the production period generally ends.