by Jeff Koehler
It’s also at the other end of the price range. Compared to Makaibari’s Rs 600 a day, an all-inclusive single at Glenburn runs around Rs 18,000 (over $300). All-inclusive means everything from the washing and darning of clothes to a jeep and driver at the disposal of every guest—from pick-up until drop-off. There are four-course meals, riverside picnics, and visits to the tea factory, guided walks with experts on traditional medical plants or birdlife, and hikes down to the 110-year-old Manjitar Suspension Bridge, which dangles one hundred feet above the Rangeet River as it crosses over to Sikkim. The day begins with a light tap on the door and a “bed tea”—a tray of freshly brewed tea and a few biscuits—and ends with sophisticated dishes that use tea and tea leaves as ingredients.
Husna-Tara Prakash was largely responsible for getting the hotel element of Glenburn operating. Raised in England, she attended boarding school in India at the elite Welham Girls’ School in Dehradun, then did her undergraduate and postgraduate work in the natural sciences in England at Cambridge. She married a man whose family owns Glenburn and ended up back in India. Visiting the estate the first time, she saw its potential as a special place to stay. After a major refurbishment, the first four rooms opened in 2002, followed by another four in 2008.
Standing on an upper balcony of the beefy, imposing redbrick Victorian mansion in Kolkata where Glenburn has an office, she explained that the hotel component wasn’t just something else to do along with producing tea. The key, she stressed, was to give the hospitality part of the garden full attention—from a packed picnic hamper with chicken-and-mint sandwiches, apple cake, and hot tea to unwrap at a scenic viewpoint on the long drive up to Glenburn from Bagdogra Airport to specially designed tea-patterned fabrics that decorate the rooms. Though there are only eight of them, they command a staff of fifty—all from Glenburn’s tea families.
The keys to the success of this concept were offering access to Glenburn’s charismatic resident tea planter, manager, tea maker, and snake catcher Sanjay Sharma, and making them feel like personal guests rather than paying clients. That meant showing them around the estate, leading tastings of Glenburn’s range of teas, and offering a glimpse of a planter’s working life. At the day’s end, Sanjay joined them for drinks on the verandah of the sprawling and elegantly refurbished century-old burra bungalow where he could hold court and tell well-honed anecdotes explaining cultural details of the garden or relate his latest snake-catching caper. Like Rajah Banerjee, he is a splendid storyteller, although his anecdotes lack the mystical platitudes so present in Rajah’s. Sanjay’s tend to be light and never preachy, rarely long, and studded with caustic, self-deprecating zingers. He tends to stop at a good line, and the remainder of the story needs to be coaxed from him.
On one muggy summer evening, the guests eventually moved to the large, oval table in the dining room with Sanjay at its head as seasoned host but also head chef. He had developed many of the kitchen’s signature dishes, mostly original takes on international classics (tea-marbled deviled eggs) or European accents on Indian ones. Sanjay’s plat de résistance is succulent tea-smoked chicken breasts served on a bed of wilted spinach leaves and moistened with a tea jus aromatized by star anise, cinnamon, bay leaves, and peppercorns. While somewhat inspired by episodes of MasterChef Australia he catches on YouTube, it is also influenced by Sanjay’s mother, who comes from the far-northeastern Indian region bordering Burma called Nagaland, where slow-smoking is an important way of preserving. The dinner finished with Glenburn’s “chai dessert,” a thick “tea” spiced with cinnamon, ginger, bay leaf, nutmeg, and vanilla seeds scraped from a leathery pod with the tip of a sharp knife and whisked as it comes to a boil to give it the consistency of a frothy cappuccino.
Glenburn is rated number one out of all of the TripAdvisor hotels listed in Darjeeling, and it’s generally booked solid. “We also make tea,” Sanjay sarcastically quipped, spooning up the last of his dessert. The guests laughed. Had Glenburn not been producing some of the finest teas in Darjeeling, it wouldn’t have been funny.*
Tourism, however, remains at the mercy of politics, as was demonstrated even before 2013’s monsoon had cleared.
After the beginning of a staggeringly good tourist season, the GJM called a strictly enforced bandh on the last day of July that shut down the hills. A month later, an Indian newspaper reported, “The unusually deserted look of the popular mall road of Darjeeling is a testimony to [its effect on tourism]. Only two of the about seven hundred hotels are partially operating, where media persons are the only inhabitants.”6
The bandh was rescinded the day after the piece ran, but the damage for the busy autumn festival season ahead had already been done. Peak tourist season in the hills is during the Puja and Diwali holidays of late October and early November. Most visitors had already canceled.
KANCHENJUNGHA IN VIEW, NO VIEWERS read a newspaper headline of the famously elusive mountain obscured by clouds much of the year. “The glistening white Kanchenjungha under an azure [sky] was in view today but there was hardly any tourist to marvel it,” the piece opened. “Chowrastha, Darjeeling’s famous promenade that is chock full in the Puja season, was deserted—the ripple effect of nearly a month of agitation that has kept visitors away.”7
Such lack of stability is also keeping investors away from larger tea-tourism projects and potentially scuttling, or at least delaying, those in the making. Perhaps that isn’t fully a bad thing. “We also make tea” would be an unfortunate and unworthy tagline for Darjeeling.
Cows, joint councils, and planters’ bungalows redone as boutique hotels may all prove to be stopgaps as much as trucking in day labor for absentee workers, measures that merely delay, or soften, the playing out of Darjeeling’s labor endgame. The solution needs to be far more radical—perhaps something along the lines that Rajah Banerjee floated a decade ago. While he has been at the forefront of many of the area’s most significant movements that eventually found a wide following from other gardens, this potential scheme could be the one that no one would dare implement.
“Nobody wants to be a farmer anywhere,” he said in the 2005 documentary on Makaibari. “But there’s a solution. The only way out. If it’s your cow, you’re going to look after it very well. If it’s your own farm, you’re going to look after it very well.” It’s about motivation through partnership, though this time through ownership. “In ten years’ time, the lands of Makaibari will be distributed to the 550 householders in Makaibari, to the ladies only, as stakeholders. The land goes back to the people. As opposed to the land that was taken away from the people in my great-grandfather’s epoch.”8
He reiterated the idea around the same time, telling Outlook agazine, “In about ten years’ time, I want to parcel out the entire tea garden area (except the forests) to the workers. After all, they’re the rightful owners of this land since they’ve worked on it for generations. I’ll purchase the tea leaves and run the factory.”9
“Maybe it’s utopian, it’s idealistic,” he said in the documentary, “but that’s the way I feel now.” He smiled widely on-screen, like an amazed child. “The colonial style of hierarchical management is over.”10
By the summer of 2013, the project appeared stalled. It was moving ahead in fits and starts, Rajah said in his office. “But [it] may not happen within my lifetime.” He seemed downcast. Or maybe just realistic. He would be risking everything that he had built up over the last forty-five years. Other estate managers in Darjeeling saw his plan as completely impossible without a well-established, cooperative system already in place. “Makaibari wouldn’t last six months,” said one.
A year later the idea had been completely discarded. In June 2014, Rajah Banerjee sold a nearly 90 percent stake in Makaibari to the Kolkata-based Luxmi Group. The Times of India valued the much coveted (and highly secretive) deal “in excess of Rs 20 crore” (Rs 200 million, about $3.5 million).11 He is in his mid-sixties; his sons seemed little inclined to take over; he felt that a decision on the garden’s fu
ture needed to be taken. Banerjee, who created and enshrined the legend of Makaibari, will remain at the helm as its face and chairman until he retires.
The Luxmi Group owns seventeen tea estates in Assam and the northeast of India that produce 15 million kilograms of tea a year, more then double all of Darjeeling. These will no doubt benefit from their association with Makaibari and its first-rate reputation. The group is heavily into real estate development and owns Obeetee, the largest manufacturer and exporter of handmade carpets in India. The new owner’s financial soundness will help Makaibari weather the current situation in the hills, while an injection of cash to strengthen brand awareness and increased distribution will bring its teas to more customers. In September, it privately sold a twenty-kilogram lot of Silver Tips Imperial plucked during the June 2013 full-moon night just before the summer solstice for $1,850 a kilogram (Rs 1.1 lakh) to a trio of specialty Makaibari retailers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. It was an auspicious start. But while the new owners inherited Makaibari’s iconic status, they have also taken over the challenges of getting workers into the fields to pluck the celebrated leaves.
Others in the hills continue to believe that the 150-year-old structure of Darjeeling’s tea gardens needs to be completely overhauled. Something must urgently be done, argues Rishi Saria, whose family owns and runs two Darjeeling estates. “I don’t see many gardens surviving in current form.”
While some management would be open to implementing an entire new system for compensating workers, they often complain that the mind-set in the Darjeeling hills is entrenched and not open to large changes. Any move would need the workers’ agreement and the government’s approval. These are often overlapping. Labor and politics here are deeply intertwined: “Those who rule the tea gardens, rule the hills,” goes a local maxim. “They’d rather see eighteen, twenty gardens shut than make any changes,” said a tea executive.
From a proprietor’s point of view, two main issues stand out: the heavy substructure of the estate, with a large number of workers who have little accountability; and having to provide rations. “We are a modern society now,” said one Darjeeling planter. “Why should we be giving them rations? They should be buying in ration shops. The British had to because there was no food. But nothing has moved on.” Even monetizing this part of the compensation continues to be highly controversial. Many garden workers see any discussion of this during labor negotiations as a way for the estate to pay them less. “They take away the rations and there will be revolution,” Rajah Banerjee warned.
Saria sees the employee-owned-and-run Kanan Devan Hills Plantation (KDHP) in southern India’s Western Ghats as a successful example of looking through Banerjee’s “alternative window.” Allowing workers to be shareholders party to an estate’s decisions and rewards might be the only way out of Darjeeling’s labor crisis.
KDHP consists of seven large gardens that cover twenty-four thousand hectares (sixty thousand acres) and produce over 23 million kilograms (50 million pounds) of CTC (nearly three-fourths of the total), orthodox, green, and organic teas. Planted out in the 1870s, it runs across the picturesque hills around Munnar in Kerala. After the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act was enacted in the 1970s and restricted foreigner ownership, the British proprietors partnered with the Tata family, who eventually acquired the plantation fully in 1983. By 2000, though, it was a losing venture, and after four consecutive years in the red, Tata decided to reduce its exposure in the plantations themselves and focus on the marketing and selling of their branded teas.12
But Tata didn’t want to close the plantation outright. When a three-month trial of a cooperative system on one of the estates showed little promise—management was turned over to a group of employees who were completely in charge of the decision making process—an employee buyout was proposed, and the board accepted it. Skeptics saw it as a clever ploy by Tata to pass off a loss-making plantation.13
On April 1, 2005, the Kanan Devan Hills Plantation Company was formed. Nearly all of the 12,700 employees became shareholders in a 69 percent ownership of the company. Tata retained an 18 percent stake, with the remaining shares held by a welfare trust and ex-Tata employees. There is a professional management team and board of directors, with employee involvement coming through numerous committees. These range from those on the grassroots level and those dealing in operational details to others being active in decision making and as members of the board. Each year, the best worker and the best staff member are appointed to the board of directors. When the top plucker was tapped, she became the first woman employee to sit on the board.
The change was immediate. Productivity shot up 24 percent in the first quarter alone, which the managing director and mastermind of KDHP, T. V. Alexander, attributed to the perfect combination of restructuring, good weather, and worker enthusiasm.14 Even once the initial excitement had faded, productivity continued to climb, from 33.3 kilograms per worker per day at the time of the handover to 52.6 by 2009–10. In 2014 it was 49.7 kilograms, an impressive number given the climatic conditions that prevailed that year.
“This feeling that the company belongs to them has brought a greater sense of commitment and responsibility,” Alexander said in 2010.15 Workers tend to keep an eye on their fellows and look for ways to cut costs and boost profits. While Darjeeling was suffering unauthorized absenteeism of over 30 percent, at KDHP it was only 10.88 percent for 2013.
The new venture also turned a surprisingly quick profit. When the plantation changed hands, it was running an 8 crore loss (Rs 80 million, or $1.8 million). In 2008–09 there was a net profit of 12.5 crore (Rs 125 million, just under $3 million), and for 2009–10 a profit of 40.48 crore (just over Rs 400 million, about $9 million). For 2013–14 the profit was Rs 15.55 crore (about $3 million).
Such profits have meant strong bonuses, capital appreciation of the shares (the Rs 10 shares are now worth about Rs 50), and dividends, which paid 14 percent in 2005–6, 25 percent in 2008–9, and 50 percent in 2009–10.16 (From 2005–2006 through 2012–2013, there was a total of 159 percent pay out.) Within just three years, the original investors had a quick return on their money.
Since the plantation’s reboot, social services have been a key part of the KDHP mission—from the three hundred Self Help Groups comprised of over five thousand women employees to offering aid in generating additional income to rice purchased in bulk directly from mills and offered at cost to the workers—along with sustainable farming practices. These efforts were rewarded in April 2014 with a coveted certificate from the New York–based Rainforest Alliance, with its green-frog seal, for following ten principals that range from social management to soil conservation and integrated waste management.
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 ca
lls 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.
