Tagged: tea board of india
Who Pays the Tea Tax?
Kenya, Sri Lanka, and India have each taxed a kilogram of tea leaving the country, at different rates, for different reasons, with different results. Here is what each levy actually does, and who really carries it.
Why a Screen Never Replaced the Tea Broker
A licensed broker still takes roughly one percent of a tea auction's value for cataloguing, tasting, and vouching for a lot no algorithm grades, and one century-old exchange has brought its old open-outcry room back after going fully digital. Here is what the commission buys, and why regulators keep steering trade through it.
Weather Insurance for Tea Only Arrived in 2025
India's government wrote tea into a weather-based insurance scheme for the first time in 2025. Sri Lanka's smaller pilot dates to 2012 and stayed small. Kenya, the top exporter, still has no scheme built around the crop at all.
Assam's Tea Economy
Assam alone grows more tea than any country except China and India itself, over half of India's total, out of three ownership models sharing one valley: private estates, a shrinking state corporation, and small growers who now supply more leaf than either.
Darjeeling's Tea Economy
Darjeeling's tea output has roughly halved in a decade and roughly half its 87 gardens have been reported as financially distressed, while the name itself has become the most heavily registered and most tightly licensed geographical indication in tea.
Geographical Indications in Tea
What a geographical indication legally is, how it differs from a trademark and a certification mark, what the WTO treaty behind it actually obliges, which tea names are registered where, and what the empirical literature says the premium is worth.
India's Tea Industry
The world's second-largest tea producer is also its largest tea-drinking nation, and the two facts explain most of the rest. How a colonial plantation crop became four distinct growing regions, a smallholder majority the estates did not see coming, an auction system half its own producers now want to escape, and a trade caught between a record export year and three separate fights over access.
The Tea Board of India
The statutory body that licenses every tea garden in the country, forces half the crop through public auction, and owns the Darjeeling name outright. It was built on a cess that no longer exists, and the mandate it still enforces is the one producers keep asking Delhi to repeal.