By Syed Zarir Hussain, IANS
Guwahati : Tea coin is the latest fad in Canada – dip the coin in hot water and drink your steaming cup of tea, that too without any fears of pesticide residues.
The latest value addition to the beverage is the tea coin – two grams of garden fresh organic tea packed in coin shape and then marketed in Canada.
And the manufacturers of the much in demand coin are the Singphos of eastern Assam’s Margherita area. The Singphos are a tribal community who are believed to have first discovered and drank tea much before the Bruce brothers, Robert and Charles, made public their discovery in 1823 of spotting tea bushes in Assam.
Produced in a 15-hectare area involving about 200 local tribal people, the organic tea manufactured under the banner of Singpho Agro Products is packaged in bamboo containers that look like coins.
“We had already sold about 10,000 pieces of tea coins in Canada. Now we are getting queries from other parts of the world, including several firms in North America. There is demand for tea coin as it is free from all chemicals,” said Rajesh Singpho, managing partner of Singpho Agro Products.
The Small Tea Cooperative, a Canada-based company, is the marketing partner of Singpho Agro Products, with the tea coin sold under the brand name of Phalap – the local name of tea in Singpho.
“The bamboo containers help in containing the natural aroma and the most distinctive quality of our tea is that we do not process it in machines or use chemicals. It is done manually and hence the premium quality,” Singpho said.
The World Community Development Education Society (WCDES), an NGO from British Columbia, Canada, was in the Margherita area for long interacting with the Singpho community. It has been one of the inspiring factors for this new venture of making value addition to tea.
Assam is considered the heart of India’s tea industry and accounts for about 55 percent of the country’s total annual tea production of about 955 million kg. India is the world’s largest tea producer. Assam tea is known for its strong and rich flavour, besides having a deep-amber colour with a malty character.
The Bruce brothers first discovered tea bushes in Assam with the help of some Singpho tribal chieftains in 1823. The discovery helped start India’s tea industry and end China’s position as the world’s supplier of the beverage.
Long before the commercial production of tea started in India in the late 1830s, the tea plant was growing wild in the jungles of Assam.
According to historical records, Robert Bruce, a British trader, first discovered the wild tea plants near Jorhat in eastern Assam with the help of a Singpho tribal chieftain. Robert died soon after and his plan to establish a nursery was followed up his brother Charles, then an employee of the East India Company.
According to Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, it was not until December 1834 when Charles sent samples to Calcutta (now Kolkata) that the plant was confirmed to be tea.
In the early 1830s, Charles set up the first tea plantation in eastern Assam’s Sadiya town and shipped 12 chests of manufactured tea to London in 1838.