No Longer The Right Climate For Tea

Climate change has unleashed havoc on the tea plantations in the Nilgiris. Frost, drought, pests — growers battle these and more...

- Vishwanath Kulkarni

Climate change is the buzz word in the country’s plantation sector these days. Commodity growers, be it of coffee, tea or rubber, among others, will tell you that changing climate has impacted them, reeling as they are from multi-year low prices. “We have witnessed very freak weather patterns since the beginning of this year till now, at regular intervals,” says Arjunan, a small tea grower at New Attuboil near Avalanchi in the Nilgiris.

First, a severe frost attack hit the production of tea leaves from December till early February. Temperatures hovered near sub-zero levels for many days during this period, says Arjunan. Tea is the only crop around New Attuboil, which is at an elevation of 2,100 feet above sea level and from where one can see the Silent Valley.

“Even as the tea bushes started recovering from the intense cold conditions in February - March, the flare-up in temperatures during April-May gave us a shock for the second time, impacting the production of leaves yet again,” says Arjunan, who’s also the headman of the Badaga hamlet that has some 100 houses and a population of around 400 people.

Then the rains came in really hard, with unusually high precipitation levels never witnessed earlier in the region.

Being on the western slopes of the Nilgiris, Attuboil receives an average rainfall of at least 1,000 millimetres, most of it during the South-West Monsoon season. “And one day in August, it started pouring and never stopped for almost three days, triggering a deluge in the region,” says Arjunan.