News — Chota Tingrai Tea Estate

After many months of work, we have finally secured an ATM for our workers at Chota Tingrai Tea Estate. This ATM will allow digital salary payments for workers and 24/7 access to cash for the community. We hope that this increased access to their accounts will help our workers grow their savings accounts, and save them long, and currently thanks to COVID-19, hazardous trips to town for banking. However, we must provide a lot of education to our workers in order to ensure that inclusion in the formal financial sector benefits them. For example, many of our workers do not know how...

February starts quietly at Chota Tingrai. The evenings are cool, the factory is silent. Even the monkeys seem off on other adventures. The tea bushes are not fans of the cold nights and cloudy mornings. The unpruned plants curl their leaves as if they shiver. The sections of pruned bushes look like they are at home in a New England forest with their bare branches. No frogs, no snakes, just annoyed cows and goats roaming the garden, trying to sneak a sweet morsel of weed from under a bush before being chased off by a garden guard. The people don't...

At Mana Organics and Chota Tingrai Tea Estate, we innovate on all fronts. From creating new social projects on the tea estate to applying new organic farming techniques, we strive to incorporate technology from around the world into our tea production to create a unique product of exceptional quality in every way. Mana Organics Super Twist Organic Green Tea is the most recent result of our innovation efforts. Created in partnership with Japanese tea makers, this tea represents the culmination of a year’s worth of work. It represents the coming together of Japanese manufacturing with Indian leaf, organic practices with...

Guest Post by Avani Jalan Education in tea estates has been a long-standing challenge. Tea estates have historically been extremely rural and lacking access to government schools. Post Indian independence, the Government mandated that tea estates have elementary schools to improve primary school access for worker communities. At first, the tea estates funded and operated schools themselves. As the state’s capacity to provide basic services increased, the government gradually took over school operation. At Chota Tingrai, have two such government schools educating 250 students. Mana Organics’ community development team works in conjunction with government teachers to ensure quality teaching and...

Guest Post by Avani Jalan By buying Mana products, you not only enjoy a great cup of tea, but also support tea growing communities and the environment. Here’s a look into one such community: Chota Tingrai tea estate spans over 1480 acres, with 860 acres of planted tea. Chota Tingrai is home to 600 families with a total population of 2200. This small community comprises people of all ages and a part of our mission is to shape this community into a self sufficient, sustainable and healthy society. The workings of this community are no less than those of a...