Guwahati: Small tea growers in Assam are still fighting a lone battle for better prices for their green leaf.

Today ask any grower and the biggest problem he or she would tell you is the low prices he gets. And the small grower has to fight all by himself.

There have been protests and demonstrations by small tea growers association on getting a decent price for their leaf, but a permanent solution still eludes them.

Undoubtedly, they are the biggest force in tea in Assam as they produce more than half of tea in the state, but on the other hand they still have to come across many challenges. The small tea grower has to do everything by himself. In many of the smaller tea farms, the owner of the farm does everything by himself as he does not have enough labour.

It has been seen on many of the farms, they even take the help of their family and close friends to help them in taking care of the farms. True, labour is a huge problem, and in many cases, contract labour is used.

The main problem is that they still do not get the benefits that their counterparts in the organised sector get. They don't even get the benefits that their colleagues get who work on large estates get. A senior official in the industry says as both of them do hard work, they should get equal benefits.

They are excluded from government protections like quality assurance support, risk mitigation strategies, structured credit, market linkages, etc. fetching the small growers' very low value.

Numerous meetings were held between the Tea Board and stakeholders in the industry to find a way forward to solve the problems. One of the ways was by asking the small tea growers to supply 40 percent of fine green leaf to the buying leaf factories in order to get a decent price. Fine leaf count is a yardstick to measure the quality of tea leaves. Though there are different methods for leaf quality assessment, ballometric count is widely used. In ballometric count, green leaf shoots equivalent to 100 balls of equal size are picked up at random from each withering trough, and thereafter these are separated into fine leaves and coarse leaves.'

An industry leader says the crux is the price of the green leaf and if that increases, the prices would rise in the auction which would lead to improvement in the overall condition of the industry.

"Both the sectors have to be on an equal footing. There cannot be two segments with different cost structures." Until this issue gets resolved, there will always be problems, "a tea planter says.

" The small tea grower should get everything." "How does it look that workers in the small tea grower sector don't get a proper wage while workers working in other sectors get everything," the planter said.

This apart, there are problems for the growers like getting finance, technical help, poor infrastructural facilities, and a lack of proper marketing.

Another problem is that they are dependent on others to get a price as they sell it to agents who later give it to the bought leaf factories. This is where the whole problem arises, with factories, saying that as the leaf is not of good quality, they cannot give him a good price.

The state governments have been encouraging the growers to set up factories as it would give them full control of their produce. A few have come up to set up factories, but there are still many who have not gone ahead. Growers have to form a self-help group or a cooperative to set up a factory. There are schemes to help the growers set up factories. Growers say they would like to have their own factory, but do not have enough income at their disposal to take the step.

And as long as they don’t have enough resources at their disposal or cannot have a common vision, it would be a difficult road ahead of them.