Climate Change Impacts India's Tea-Growing Region

By Anjana Pasricha

Photo: AP

An Indian tea worker plucks tea leaves at the Amchong estate in Digaru district of India's northeastern Assam state (file photo – 27 May 2010)

New Delhi, Jan 5 : In India's main tea-growing region, scientists say tea production is being impacted by climate change. India produces nearly one third of the world's tea.

The rolling Himalayan hills in India's northeastern state, Assam, are carpeted with lush tea bushes whose leaves produce some of the world's finest teas.

But there are concerns that rising temperatures may be affecting the tea plantations, resulting in declining productivity of the brew to which millions of people across the world wake up.
The director of the Tea Research Association in Assam, Mridul Hazrika, is studying the impact of climate change on tea production.

"We have observed that minimum temperature has rise[n] by two degrees centigrade and there is a reduction in the rainfall in the last 90 years by around 200 millimeters. And this is very important, very significant from the point of tea as a plantation crop," Hazrika said.

Scientists say rising temperatures can affect the ability of the tea bush to grow. Tea production in the Assam region has declined in recent years, although the area under cultivation has risen.

Erratic rainfall patterns are of particular concern to planters because the tea plant is largely dependent on the weather. They point out that last year there were fewer days with sunshine, resulting in humid conditions which are unfavorable for the growth of the tea plant.

Planters are optimistic that the sturdy tea bush will adapt, but they are looking at ways to combat the impact of climate change.

Arijit Raha is an official with the Indian Tea Association, based in Kolkata.  

"The industry has been looking at irrigation as an option, but tea plantations are huge, irrigating 100 percent is a very expensive proposition," Raha said. "One is also looking at other options, drought-resistant plants but those are things which will come in the future."

There have been some reports that the flavor of the Assam tea, known to produce a strong cup of tea, has also been impacted.

But the chairman of the Indian Tea Association, C.S. Bedi, dismisses any link between quality of the tea and climate change. He says other reasons may be responsible for this.  

"I belong to a generation which in many ways has systematically gone in for very high fertilization," Bedi said. "That has affected quality I am certain. It's gone in for very high pesticide application, for very high herbicidal application. When you look back in hindsight, these were not really the best environmental friendly operations…Today we are looking at correcting things. We are looking for more organic products, we are looking at organic teas." 

Assam produces more than half of India's tea. India accounts for nearly one-third of the world's tea production.

The Bazaar Comes Too On A Train Journey to Assam

Passengers on the Brahmaputra Mail are entranced by an endless stream of hawkers, chai-wallahs and entertainers

By Rick Beven

Mobile bazaar ... vendors sell snacks to passengers on a train in India. Photograph: Kapoor Baldev/Sygma/Corbis

The Brahmaputra Mail from New Delhi to Dibrugarh in Upper Assam traverses most of northern India in a gentle parabola. When we got on at New Jalpaiguri in West Bengal the train was already 36 hours into its journey and was still a day from Dibrugarh.

Trolley service started immediately. Chai-wallahs strode through our carriage carrying huge kettles. Egg-wallahs followed with metal pails of boiled eggs shelled in a matter of seconds and served on squares of torn newspaper. Once under way, our train became a mobile bazaar. An endless stream of hawkers flooded through the carriage.

One reversed a battery-charged armoured car across the floor in front of a bored five-year-old. An itinerant cobbler fixed the zip on my neighbour's suitcase. A priest in a grey Nehru jacket offered us blessings for a fee.

We passed a troop train of turbaned Sikh soldiers, the regimental chefs peeling potatoes in an open wagon at the back of the train. Lunch arrived: foil plates of chicken biryani completely immune to our plastic cutlery.

A young boy holding a tin can led a blind singer through our carriage. Children swept the rubbish from under our seats before coming back to claim baksheesh. I watched them jump off at the next station to catch the down train and allow a new crew on.

There was a sudden flutter of excitement as a troupe of transgender hijras in shimmering saris and bangles passed through our carriage demanding dance money. It is considered unlucky to refuse.

I whispered the names of the stations we passed: New Cooch Behar, Bongaigaon, Bijni. Our arrival made them boil with activity. There were blue trolleys on bicycle wheels selling hot flaky puris with a gravy of potatoes and peas. Kiosks labelled "South Indian Food" sold masala dosas as large and fragile as teak leaves. Passengers got out to fill their silver tiffin boxes and casually stepped back on to the moving train.

Just before Guhawti the train clanked across a bridge over the limpid silver of the Brahmaputra river. A group of musicians in white dhotis pushed into the carriage amid a cacophony of drums and cymbals, while two girls of exquisite beauty danced a traditional Assamese dance. Our in-train entertainment had finally arrived.

Bru Repatriation to Resume on Jan 12

Aizawl, Jan 4 :  An official meeting would be held in Mamit district in Mizoram tomorrow to discuss arrangements for the repatriation of Bru refugees from six relief camps in North Tripura, scheduled to resume from January 12.

Official sources said today that the meeting, at a place near Mizoram-Tripura border, would deliberate on different issues including transportation, identification of villages where the repatriated refugees would be resettled and distribution of free rations.

In another development, the Mizoram Bru Displaced People’s Forum (MBDPF), the main anti-repatriation organisation among Bru refugees, agreed not to create obstacles during the proposed resumption of the refugee repatriation scheduled to begin from January 12.

Reports said that a meeting, convened by Suhas Chakma, Chairman of the Asian Centre for Human Rights at Kanchanpur in North Tripura on December 29 last, attended by Bru leaders including A Sawibunga, R Laldawngliana and Bruno Msha, respectively President, Vice-president and General Secretary of the MBDPF discussed the proposed repatriation at length.

The Bru leaders agreed that the proposed resumption of repatriation to begin from January 12 should not be obstructed but put conditions that negotiations must be held with the Centre and the State Governments of Mizoram and Tripura and that an agreement should be inked.

The issue would be further discussed among the Bru refugee organisations, Sawibunga said.

Bamboo Bane

KALA SAMBASIVAN

Settlers in the hilly region of the North East found the place exotic. There were evergreens, timber trees and over a hundred varieties of bamboo.

Come listen to yet another tale from your old langur story-teller!

It is a tale that I never tire of repeating for it is about an incredibly beautiful place in which lurks the shadow of Death.

Many hundreds of years ago, large groups of people from China moved south to find new homes. Some settled in Myanmar; some went further west into India. There in the hilly region of the northeast, they found a homeland that they named Mizoram or the “Land of Highlanders”. They couldn't have imagined a more exotic place than this tiny piece of land! The new settlers hoped for a prosperous and peaceful life. And why not? Trust an old langur when he tells you that Mizoram has everything any man or monkey would want.

On the slopes of the Mizo Hills they found evergreens, timber trees and over a hundred different varieties of bamboo. The dense forests sheltered tigers, elephants, bears, leopards and of course, monkeys. Colourful birds and butterflies filled forests and valleys, in which grew orchids, geraniums and many other flowers. Heavy monsoon rains helped them farm the land. Yes, life was wonderful for the people till 1869 when the Mull bamboo bloomed in the forests.

Blooming problem

Young ones, before I continue my story, I have to tell you a little about the bamboo plant. Have you seen one in a forest? Probably not. The hollow, woody stem is green as the plant has no leaves till it reaches its full height. Some grow to only three feet, others grow to be 50-ft giants. Some flower every year and some only once in 10,000 years! But one thing is the same for all bamboos — they bloom and die once new seeds are formed. The old bamboo makes room for new ones in the same place.

Back to my story.

The Mull bamboo blooms once every 50 years or so. When it gave out big clumps of flowers all at the same time, the Mizo people were mesmerised. They had never seen anything so beautiful before. In time the blooms produced millions of seeds. That was the start of a huge problem. From nowhere it seemed, a thousand rats appeared to feed on the protein-rich seeds. Soon, a thousand rats became ten thousand rats; and ten thousand became a hundred thousand and so on. Mizoram had a rat attack. The hungry rodents ate bamboo seeds, grains from fields, granaries and homes. There was no stopping them. There was nothing left for man and other animals. Many died of starvation. It was an unbelievable tragedy.

Did it happen again? Yes, the bamboo bloomed again in 1911. Another famine for the people. It happened yet again in 1959; and guess what, between 2006 and 2008, flowers appeared on mull bamboo. What will happen now?

I don't know. . . looks like there is no easy solution to this problem.

But, children, I ask you as a disinterested monkey, did rats enter the land of people or did people migrate to the land of the rats?

ULFA Softens Demand on Assam Independence

Soldiers stand guard in Guwahati

Guwahati, Jan 4 : United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the top militant group fighting in the country's remote northeast for almost three decades has dropped its demand for independence in talks with New Delhi, softening its stand in an insurgency that has killed thousands of people.

The ULFA is one of the deadliest separatist groups in the northeast, and progress in resolving the insurgency, which has been a drain on resources, would boost New Delhi in a region rich in oil and tea.

Arabinda Rajkhowa, also known as Rajib Rajkonwar, chairman of ULFA, said on Sunday his group was for the first time willing to talk to the government without condition.

The group has until now set conditions, including talks under United Nations supervision on the independence of Assam state. New Delhi rejected that demand.

"If our peace efforts fail we will come back to you and seek your guidance on whether to take up arms again or fight it out politically for our rights," Rajkhowa, who was caught in 2009 and released on bail this month, told a public rally.

Thousands have died in three decades of violence since ULFA was formed in 1979 in Assam, demanding independence from India which it accused of plundering the region's mineral and agricultural resources, but public support for the group has sagged recently.

(Reporting By Biswajyoti Das; Editing by Krittivas Mukherjee and Daniel Magnowski)

Building The Universe of The Poem

By Ashley Tellis

Mizo poet Mona Zote opens up about the process of writing; her north-eastern identity and life in general. ASHLEY TELLIS

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Part of my present frustration is rooted in the sense of not being able to piece together the shapes of my environment.

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Creating word pictures: Mona Zote.

Mona Zote is a promising young poet from Mizoram. Her poems have appeared in various places — most recently in SPARROW'S Being Carried Far Away: Poems and Stories of Women in Assamese, Bengali, Garo, Manipuri and Mizo — and her enigmatic, assured poems are haunting and resonant. Here she speaks about the process of writing, about being from Mizoram and life in general

What are the influences on your work; the raw materials of your poetry?

Life, I suppose. Writing is partly an effort to make sense of things and partly an attempt to keep from going insane. The absurdity of life, the inherent strangeness of whatever is considered normal. People and their byzantine reasons for doing what they do.

Tell us a little about the process of writing? Do you do drafts? Do you revise?

Drafts and revisions, yes definitely. There are only two ways of writing a poem: either a line comes to you or you reach for that crucial line. It's always the first way for me. I usually don't get up from the chair until it's completed right up to the last word, after which the work of revising begins. The exception is ‘Rez', which turned into a peculiar never-ending process. I keep going back to it, so it's sort of still ongoing despite having been published. It escapes a finalised form. Like a tune that bothers you because you can't get it right.

Your poetry has a very assured tone and a world that the universe of the poem itself builds. Is this something that just comes to you or you work to create it?

Does it? I don't think I ever consciously worked towards building a world so it comes as a surprise to hear this. Although ‘world-building' in a Tolkien-esque sense has always been a favourite pastime since childhood, no doubt an outcome of constantly being on the move. So presumably it is something that just happens; that someone reading my poems might see. I don't particularly see it myself…in fact part of my present frustration is rooted in the sense of not being able to piece together the shapes of my environment. It's like standing too close to a stained glass window; you glimpse colours and suggestions of forms but the picture in its entirety is not discernible.

How important are the identities ‘Mizo' and ‘woman' to you as a poet?

They are inseparable at the moment. I might feel differently in the future.

Does your unpoetic job (Zote works with the Mizo government in the Income Tax Department) and your poetry inform each other at all?

They have very little to do with each other, which is just as well. Though working in a job that requires you to be scrupulously exact and logical all of the time has had an effect on the way I think, perceive and interpret things. Hopefully for the better and more likely for the worse.

Why don't you have a collection published as yet? Do you have one in your head?

I don't think anything I have written so far could comprise a collection, thematically or quantitatively. There are poems I wrote in Shillong and poems written in Aizawl and, somewhere between, during and after the two phases a kind of fatal break occurred that I have not been able to bridge with any degree of success. Right now I am struggling to write at all, so there's no thought of bringing out a collection soon; apart from my suspicion that poetry may not be the best means to deal with whatever one has been through here. Or it should be supplemented, maybe subverted.

What is it like working and writing in Aizawl?

Horrible and weirdly fascinating.

Who do you see as your community as a poet? Do you relate to mainland Indian poetry in English or other languages?

It's difficult to say. One could be glib about it but, to be honest, I think every poet is a community unto herself. By necessity we have to be. I have a deep sense of envy, for lack of a better term, for poets who are readily identifiable with the community they happen to be a part of, who are apparently seamless parts of that community. Or poets who effortlessly incorporate the local rather than talking about them from the perspective of an intrigued and observant outsider.

Well, insofar as there are common themes – of the sheer fact of being human and living out the universal human muck and mess – running through what we write, it's not hard to declare that one can relate to mainland Indian poetry in any language. I suppose the truth of the matter would be that the concerns of a poet writing in the Deccan heartland would be quite different from someone writing from the fringes of the country. Weigh in the factor of cultural separateness and one wonders how we could relate to each other's writings at all. But we do.

Do you write in Mizo as well?

No. A pity because there's so much uncharted territory in the language.

How do you respond to the quietude of post-insurgency Mizoram? How do you respond to the religious, patriarchal and political conservatism of the region?

That word ‘quietude' carries a little eddy behind it. There's a remarkable story – and now I am no longer sure if I merely dreamed I heard it – that right before the declaration of peace a thick cloud of butterflies drifted over the town out of the west. I sometimes think it was indeed a portent, just not the way the person who told me this story thought of it. We lost ourselves in the insurgency – an insurgency that need not have happened, by the way. Something left us. And we have grown a tissue over the wound but the scar is festering untended. People simply shut it out, they don't think about it on an active level yet the trauma filters through in small ways.

And while religion supposedly heals or consoles, it can also inflict a cultural damage that is difficult to diagnose or even acknowledge. The process of inquiry is beginning, though.

Mizo society is so inherently self-contradictory that it took me a while to see it's just the same old patterns of patriarchy and class at work here as elsewhere.

No Newspapers in Manipur Since December 30

Imphal, Jan 3 : Newspapers have not hit the stands in Manipur since December 30 due to a collective decision taken by the state's journalists to protest against the arrest of a local editor for allegedly having links with a militant outfit.

Official sources said the editor of a vernacular daily, A Mobi, was arrested on December 29 for alleged links with militant outfit Kangleipak Communist Party-Tabungba group (KCP-T).

A spokesperson of the All Manipur Working Journalists' Union (AMWJU) said Mobi, the vice-president of AMWJU, was entrusted to contact militant outfits to ensure that they did not disturb media houses and allowed them to function smoothly.

He said while a faction of a militant outfit would want their statement to be published, another would hold out threats against its publication.

Representatives of AMWJU have called on Chief Minister O Ibobi Singh demanding unconditional release of the editor, who is in police custody, the spokesperson said.

AMWJU had held several executive meetings in the past few days and requested the state government to provide security to media houses in view of the threats from militant outfits, he said.

He added that it was decided not to publish any newspapers till Mobi was released.

Govt. Excludes Manipur, Mizoram & Nagaland From 'Protected Area' For Foreigners

New Delhi, Jan 3 : The Central Government has now decided to exclude the entire area of the States of Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland from the 'Protected Area' regime notified under the Foreigners (Protected Areas) Order 1958, initially for a period of one year.

However, all foreigners visiting these States will have to register themselves with the Foreigners Registration Officer (FRO) of the district that they visit within 24 hours of their arrival.

Citizens of some specified countries would, however, continue to require prior approval of the Ministry of Home Affairs before their visit to these three States.

Indian Missions/Posts have also been authorized to issue 'Missionary Visa' to foreign Missionaries visiting these three States as per the extant guidelines of the Government.

These changes will ease the difficulties being faced by foreigners to visit these three States. These instructions would come into force with effect from January 1, 2011, said a Home Ministry release.