India

Production, trade and price

How production is organised

Estate-dominated in the districts that made its reputation, and increasingly not elsewhere. Assam and Darjeeling were built as plantations with resident workforces, and that history is documented and contested rather than settled: recruitment of labour from central India in the colonial period, and the wage, housing and citizenship questions that followed from a workforce living on the estate it works, are a live subject in Indian public argument today. Against that, the fastest-growing part of the industry is small growers selling green leaf to bought-leaf factories, in districts — Kishanganj, parts of the Terai — that never had estates at all.

How firm this is: Inferred by TeaHQ from general knowledge of the trade rather than taken from a source that states it. The plantation history and the growth of the small-grower sector are both well attested. TeaHQ records the labour history as contested public argument rather than adjudicating it, and asserts no proportion.

What it produces

Predominantly black tea, both orthodox and CTC. A very large share of production is consumed domestically rather than exported.

How firm this is: Inferred by TeaHQ from general knowledge of the trade rather than taken from a source that states it. Directionally well established; exact proportions vary by year and by source and are not recorded here.

Growing regions in India

Named districts with their own elevation, climate and character. Elevation figures are recorded as ranges because sources disagree on where a district begins and ends.

• Anamalai
• Arunachal Pradesh
• Assam
• Barak Valley
• Coonoor
• Coorg (Kodagu)
• Darjeeling — protected designation
• Dooars
• Kangra — protected designation
• Kishanganj
• Kumaon
• Kurseong — protected designation
• Meghalaya
• Mirik — protected designation
• Munnar
• Nilgiri
• North Bank (Assam)
• Teesta Valley — protected designation
• Temi
• Terai
• Tripura
• Upper Assam
• Wayanad

How its tea is graded

India uses the leaf-grade abbreviations (OP, FTGFOP and relatives) that most consumers encounter first. These describe leaf size and appearance — whole leaf, tip content, brokenness — and are not a quality scale, nor comparable with Chinese or Japanese classification.

How tea is drunk here

Masala chai is a household preparation with enormous regional variation; there is no single authoritative recipe.

Teas from India

• Anamalai tea
• Assam
• Assam clonal
• Assam first flush
• Assam golden tips
• Assam second flush
• Chai blend base
• Darjeeling autumn flush
• Darjeeling first flush
• Darjeeling green tea
• Darjeeling monsoon flush
• Darjeeling muscatel
• Darjeeling second flush
• Darjeeling white tea
• Dooars and Terai
• Kangra tea
• Munnar tea
• Nilgiri
• Nilgiri frost tea
• Sikkim (Temi)
• Wayanad tea

Guides covering this origin

• OP, BOP, FTGFOP: what the letters mean, and what they cannot tell you — The letter grades describe the appearance of sorted leaf in one family of producing countries. They are a real, useful and precisely defined vocabulary about size and tip content — and they are not a quality scale, not comparable between origins, and not awarded by anybody.
• How a tea auction works — Auctions still handle a large share of the world’s black tea. The mechanism — consignment, cataloguing, pre-sale sampling, competitive bidding, settlement through a broker — explains both why the system has survived and why so much tea now bypasses it.
• Smallholders, estates and cooperatives — Three ways of organising tea production, with three different distributions of capital, risk and bargaining power. Which one a country runs on explains more about its tea than its climate does.
• The Assam experiment, and what it was actually solving — British India did not discover tea in Assam by accident and did not plant it because the ground was good. It built an industry there to end a strategic dependence on Chinese supply, and the decisions it took in that decade set the shape of the world tea trade.
• How Darjeeling became a protected name — The best-documented attempt to turn a tea name into an enforceable right, and a useful record of what such protection can and cannot do. The machinery is real; the enforcement outside India has been substantially harder than the registration.
• Which countries grow tea — Around fifty countries grow tea commercially and four of them account for most of it. The more useful split is not who grows the most but who exports, who drinks their own, and who does something neither of those numbers shows.
• Does the growing region change the taste? — Yes, and much less directly than the word terroir implies. Most of what a reader attributes to place turns out on inspection to be cultivar and processing — both of which travel with the place, and neither of which is the place.
• Garden, estate, factory or farm: what the words mean — The vocabulary for a tea-producing unit differs sharply between countries, and the same English word means different things in Assam, Anxi and Uji. Knowing which system a packet is speaking in tells you what it is and is not promising.