Perhaps the clearest sign of the plantation’s success came in July 2013 when Tata bought just over 10 percent of KDHP shares, taking its stake up to 28 percent.17
While KDHP is very much on a macro scale—it produces almost three times the tea of all Darjeeling—Saria sees the model of workers owning 70 percent of the estate as viable in Darjeeling, even for individual gardens that produce a mere fraction of that amount of tea. The biggest issue at the moment on Darjeeling’s estates is the workers. “Their end needs to be sorted out more than anything else.” Offering them an ownership stake would fulfill a long-held dream of generations of workers and would also ensure the continued quality of Darjeeling tea. “If you want quality, you can’t have workers not involved. And why buy Darjeeling if you are not getting quality?”
More double-hedge plantings of high-quality cultivars, better soil, and a motivated team thoroughly invested in the success of the estate could double production from roughly four hundred kilograms (nine hundred pounds) a hectare, which is the area’s current norm, to eight hundred kilograms, Saria believes. By having to deal less with the day-to-day running of the factory and fields of Gopaldhara and Rohini, including continual labor issues, he and his father could focus on marketing and giving more energy to what he calls the “value chain” that stretches from production to distribution, bringing up the per kilogram value of their teas. He figures that revenue could triple. “If revenues go up, so can wages.”
KDHP find their system of employee ownership promising and see no reason why, with some slight tailoring, it cannot be put into practice elsewhere. “Implementation of such a model is the most challenging part,” according to Sanjith Raju, KDHP’s deputy manager of Human Resources. “There has to be a continued commitment and willingness by the top management.” KDHP carried out an unprecedented effort to educate every one of its massive workforce in the benefits of the new ownership model. “Each employee had to understand the proposed model and put their trust in this experiment that had been the first of its kind in the tea industry.” That required a willingness to invest their own money in the new company. For workers who required it, management helped secure loans from various financial institutions. Today, 99.8 percent of the workers own shares. Each holds at least three hundred shares.
“Transparent business operations and employee relations has been the cornerstone for sustaining this successful venture,” Raju said. The continuing investment in KDHP by both workers as well as Tata reflects the success of their model that remains based heavily on trust.
Any change to the structure of Darjeeling’s gardens needs to be bold. Merely tinkering with the details will make little lasting difference. Employee ownership would be a fight to implement. But a big fight might be the only long-term solution to dealing with the labor crisis. “You have to take a great leap forward,” Saria said. “You can’t be fighting over pennies when pounds are at stake.”
* Having dreamt of life under wide African skies as a kid, and more recently of new challenges after twenty years in the Darjeeling hills, nearly all of them on Glenburn, Sanjay defied both conventional wisdom and the expectations that he would forever remain in Darjeeling. He was courted for a number of years by his original employer and during the 2014 harvest finally accepted a position managing a particularly picturesque tea estate in western Uganda with a desire not just to make great teas but also to eventually open the kind of guest house that operates on Glenburn.
CHAPTER 19
Back down the Hill
Tea estate factories close during the Hindu festival of Diwali, the five-day “festival of lights” that takes place in autumn. Over the following few weeks, the remaining tea is picked off the trees and processed, packed into tin-rimmed wooden boxes or flat, hand-stenciled paper sacks, and loaded into the back of snub-nosed trucks and Mahindra Pik-Ups for the plains.
Along Hill Cart Road, the narrow-gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway runs alongside and, in places, right on the roadway itself. Shops sit so close that shiny foil packets of chaat can be plucked off the shelves by passengers, or oranges that have just arrived from orchards in the Mirik Valley. Between the scattered roadside villages, overhanging trees tunnel the road in a lattice of branches. Rays of light, as though filtered through the high, broken windows of a deserted mill, whiten the road in spots. All around, on the steep hillsides, the smooth sprawl of tea is offset by thatches of impenetrable scrub, deep forest, and sheer drops. Small groups of half-hidden pluckers move imperceptibly on the distant hillsides.
At Kurseong, the serpentine traffic turns onto the Rohini Road, curling around a series of switchbacks like a cycling peloton. The view stretches down to the flat, brown plains with a slivery flash of river in the distance. Small groups of skinny men with scarves pulled around their mouths stand beside pots of burning tar: road crews repairing damage from the recent monsoon. Fist-size stones outline eaten-away patches of asphalt. Vehicles shunt around the tight corners, slowing to a stop in places to yield to trucks laboring up the narrow road. Ears pop from the change of pressure. Autumnal shadows angle across the tarmac. At the corners where streams pass under the road, trucks with large, open tanks have returned to siphon water to sell to villagers. A troop of monkeys sit across a web of branches like ornaments.
Eventually the road descends through tiered terraces of rice paddies. Sun catches the golden stalks, bending under the weight of the ripe, purple-tipped grains just a few weeks from being harvested. A pair of water buffalo with shiny backs, silvery as sealskins in the sun, amble along a narrow path. Triangular traffic signs bordered in red warn of elephants crossing the road. The plains. The air has lost its sharpness. Dust seems to gather and hang, giving a buttery hue to the light. Below a bridge over the Balasan River, a dozen women from a settlement of stonebreakers spread their colorful, laundered saris across the rocky riverbed to dry. At the T-junction near Siliguri, the traffic forms a tailback, then stutters ahead.
In Siliguri the tea gets transferred to railcars or hefty, highly decorated lorries—colorful vehicles adorned with painted frescoes of gods and mythical landscapes, and the ubiquitous HORN PLEASE across the tailgate, to which drivers happily respond—destined for Kolkata warehouses before going to buyers or the auction house.
The end of the year. The daily struggle of getting tea in, processed, and out to customers begins to fade—at least for a few months. Questions bubble to the forefront about the future, about Darjeeling’s precarious future.
Even if it can counter, or at least adapt to, the changes in weather, endure Gorkhaland’s frequently disruptive statehood aspirations, and stem the exodus of workers—that is, navigate environmental, political, and social change—and continue to make exquisite teas, will Darjeeling keep its place among the finest artisanal goods on the globe? Even if more Indians begin to drink Darjeeling’s tea, can it sustain relevancy in India, or its collective cultural heritage? For global consumers, how can Darjeeling’s gardens break from their hilltop isolation and share with an audience beyond a coterie of aficionados what makes their tea so unique—not only in flavor, but history, methods, and culture? How can they demonstrate the importance of its continuing?
Most growers seem content to produce fine teas, but not necessarily to offer the language with them that will seduce buyers. Planters are rarely successful in sharing their deep passion for the leaf or in offering a unique drinking experience to accompany their exquisitely handcrafted products. They have not been able to share what makes their teas so special—so utterly unique, with such a compelling story—that people should spend a significant amount more for Darjeeling tea than just about anything else on the shelf of a tea shop. That remains, more often than not, trapped up in the hills.