Aad Van Helden (left) with his wife Mieneke at a tea estate in Jalpaiguri on Friday. Picture by Biplab Basak

Siliguri, Oct. 7: A Dutch filmmaker is making a documentary on tea production in north Bengal to help promote Indian tea in the Netherlands and other European Union countries.

“Although the annual per capita consumption of tea in the Netherlands is 3kg (in India it is 750gm), Indian tea has a comparatively small share in it,” said Aad Van Helden, who was here till last week to shoot the documentary. “We intend to promote Indian tea in our country and also in some other European Union nations.”

Aad Van is here as a representative of Solidaritat, a Dutch NGO that has worked in countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa to promote, and sometimes highlight the problems of, plantation crops like banana and coffee.

For the Indian project, Solidaritat has tied up with the Institute of Plantation, Agriculture and Rural Workers (IPARW), a Jalpaiguri-based NGO working for sustainable livelihood of labourers engaged in these areas.

Aad Van’s wife Mieneke is a volunteer of Solidaritat and she came with him to Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri to shoot the 20-minute documentary. “They had been working since September 29 and finished their work on Friday,” said Samir Roy of the IPARW. North Bengal was the only tea producing area in India that the Dutch couple visited, Roy added.

“The target audience of the film will be the common people of India and the European Union, business houses, consumer groups, government officials, small producers and workers,” Roy added.

In course of their nine-day visit, Aad Van and Mieneke interviewed about 40-50 stakeholders of the Indian tea industry, including planters, workers, managing directors of big tea houses and trade union leaders.

“We tried to know from the stakeholders their take on the prospects of Indian tea in the international market. We also asked them about the present situation of tea industry and how they are trying solve the problems that are scourging it,” Aad Van said.

On Saturday, the husband and wife also interviewed Union minister of state for commerce and industry Jairam Ramesh, who arrived in the region primarily to pursue the Centre’s action plan regarding closed tea gardens.