By IRNA,
Margherita, India : Tea coins manufactured by a local tribal community in India’s northeastern state of Assam is the latest craze in Europe and other South East Asian countries with people simply dipping the coin in piping hot water and sipping it.
“The demand for the organic tea coin is increasing by the day after we were able to penetrate markets in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, China, Thailand, and now in Hong Kong,” Rajesh Singpho, owner of the Singpho Agro Products, that manufactures the organic tea coins, said.
Packed in silver foils, the tea coins come in a neat pack of 2 grams, 5 grams, and 10 grams and is ready to use – dip the coin into a pot of hot water and is ready to drink.
“The ratio is one to four – you can get four cups of strong tea by dipping a coin weighing 2 grams,” Singpho said.
“People in Europe and other South East Asian nations are increasingly health conscious and would rather prefer organic Indian tea then the conventional tea.”
Spread over an area of about nine hectares of land in Margherita, 540 km east of Assam’s main city of Guwahati, Singpho and his 100-odd workforce toil hard to produce about 90,000 kg of organic tea annually.
“The entire process of manufacturing the tea is done in a traditional manner without the use of any machines or gadgets. It is all done manually,” Singpho said.
The Singpho tribe in Assam and adjoining Arunachal Pradesh state, now numbering about 25,000, is believed to have first discovered tea bushes.
In the late 1830s, long before the commercial production of tea started in India, the tea plant was growing wild in the jungles of Assam.
Singpho tribes-people ate the leaves as a vegetable with garlic, besides drinking the brew after dipping the leaves in boiled water.
“We are fetching a price of Rs 1,000 per kilogram of the tea we make. We sell it loose and also in the form of coins,” Singpho said.
The loose tea is packed in bamboo containers so that the traditional properties are maintained and free from any preservatives or chemicals.
“We are getting orders for 2,000 kg of tea coins from Hong Kong. We are now working overtime to meet the demand,” the young tea planter said.
India is the world’s largest tea producer after China and produced a record crop of 962 million kilograms in 2008 compared to 945 million kilograms the previous year.
The northeastern state of Assam accounted for 55 percent of the total output, although a bulk of them is the conventional tea.
A kilogram of the premium quality Assam tea fetched Rs 90 in the last weekly auctions.