Vahdam India this week donated $50,000 to launch a fundraiser as part of #RiseTogetherForIndia, a COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund. Donations will assist the non-profit Doctors for You deliver relief services across India. The company seeks to mobilize tea drinkers worldwide to set up temporary COVID treatment facilities, acquire oxygen cylinders and concentrators and facilitate rapid vaccination efforts. India reported more than three million on new COVID cases in the past two weeks. Eighteen million are currently infected.
Funds totaled $86,000 from 225 donors with 14 days remaining in the campaign.
Doctors for You 100 bed COVID Care Facility at Shehnai Banquet Hall, New Delhi
Doctors For You
Covid-19 has emerged as a pandemic affecting the entire globe. This has tested public health preparedness to the optimum level even in developed countries who are still struggling to deal with the situation. In India as of 30 April 2021 there were 18.8 million cases of Covid-19 reported with 208,000 deaths.
Covid-19 has created fear and made us realize how bad this can turn out to be for the poorest, for those who will lose their livelihood, or those who wouldn’t know what to do to save themselves when the virus has reached someone close to them. It has also put additional strain on the already challenged healthcare system.
Doctors for You is operating 15 locations including 45-bed rural Covid Care dedicated Hospital (CCDH) in Anekal, Karnataka and another in Yelahanka General Hospital a which is 33-bed facility having 3 HDU beds and 30 oxygen beds.
WHO, UNICEF and other organizations are rushing staff and supplies to India to help fight the crushing tide of new cases. UNICEF is delivering critical oxygen concentrators and diagnostic testing systems, hygiene supplies and PPE kits to protect health care workers.
The Red Cross is responding with disaster resources including the delivery of medical supplies and emergency services across India. In March Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Chairman of the Indian Red Cross Society inaugurated a Nucleic Acid Testing (NAT) Testing Facility at the IRCS NHQ Blood Centre. He also inaugurated three fully equipped vehicles, including two blood collection vans which would be used to hold blood camps and add blood units to the Red Cross Blood Centre.
Hospitals urgently need oxygen cylinders and concentrators across India. Mission Oxygen is a crowd funded volunteer effort organized by 250 young entrepreneurs to raise funds to locate and distribute thousands of concentrators and cylinders the fund had raised $3.8 million from 28,000 donors as of the first of May.
A worker a Jalinga Tea Estate in South Assam making biomass pellets from tea waste to fuel tea dryers
India’s first carbon-neutral tea estate is constructing the country’s most sustainable tea factory.
Contractors at the Jalinga Tea Estate in South Assam, India’s largest organic tea grower, will complete India’s first zero-emission tea factory in July. With a capacity of 900 metric tons, the solar-powered factory is a large-scale model of efficiency using pellet-fired dryers, improved composting, biochar, and biomass gasification. Jalinga is India’s only Soil & More Impacts certified CO2 neutral estate.
The factory is jointly financed through the Jalinga Climate Tea Research Foundation (JCTRF), a partnership between Jalinga Tea Estate and Atmosfair, a German non-profit committed to reducing CO? emissions by promoting, developing, and financing renewable energy projects in more than 15 countries.
Jalinga has produced organic tea since 2004 at this organic certified factory.
Patrizia Pschera, Atmosfair’s Manager of Climate Mitigation Projects, writes that Jalinga “is making great efforts to minimise CO2 emissions and to make tea cultivation sustainable.”
JCTRF is developing and testing climate-friendly ways of growing and processing tea while promoting adaptation to changing climate conditions, she explained. “The aim is to establish a self-sustaining concept for the climate friendly and ecological cultivation of tea that can be transferred to tea gardens all over Assam,” according to Pschera who authored a case study on the project published on the Atmosfair website.
Pschera praised the estate for “making well thought-out and far-reaching changes to its production, which goes further than buying CO2 neutrality through certificates.”
In May, Atmosfair will visit Jalinga with reporters and a camera team from ZDF, a German TV channel making a documentary.
Jalinga Director Ketan Patel said the factory is half-finished and would be complete with solar panel installation by July. “It will run on 100% biomass pellets and briquettes and replace coal completely. Electricity will be generated through solar panels,” he said.
The factory will cost €300,000 ($360,000) to build and equip; an investment split equally between Atmosfair and Jalinga.
“This is my most passionate endeavor to date,” said Patel, a long-time advocate of Earth-friendly endeavors on the 650-hectare estate. Jalinga is a third-generation family business farmed organically since 2004. In 2018 Jalinga Tea Estate received the North American Tea Conference’s “Sustainability Award” presented annually.
The estate has adopted several climate-friendly social initiatives. Workers are supplied low-emission cookstoves instead of using firewood to improve air quality within dwellings, Patel explained, a simple innovation that reduces deforestation and improves the health of workers and their families.
“Jalinga is a demonstration site, we intend to commercialize the technology and share it with the whole tea industry,” said Patel.
“Atmosfair will look at the carbon emissions in the factory and develop carbon credits and take these back into the EU. They sell these carbon credits to airlines, government, etc.,” he said, adding, “It’s a win-win situation for the industry and environment.”
Pellet-Fired Dryers
The Indian government has the mandate to cut carbon emissions. One of the biggest problems in the industry is the reliance on coal to fuel dryers. Burning fossil fuels leads to the release of pollutants into the atmosphere. The availability of coal is also an issue. Coal mining is now illegal in Meghalaya, raising costs and making coal less available. Patel said that coal leaves a residue on tea plants, soot that is not suitable for human consumption.
Jalinga will rely on tea waste, an excellent fuel when converted to biomass pellets. Prunings, waste leaves, and grass from weeding have relatively low ash content and generate 20 MJ of energy per kilo.
“Many crop residues remain unused every year. Their decay in local dumps produces the greenhouse gas methane. At the same time, tea plantation operators dry the tea leaves with coal, releasing CO2. The JCTRF will test how plantation operators can use a pelleting machine to compress crop residues to use them as fuel instead of fossil coal,” said Patel. “We will be doing extensive research on climate-friendly ways to produce tea, both in the plantation & the factory so that the whole chain can lead to zero carbon tea production,” he said.
Toward Carbon Zero
The garden is also doing extensive R&D on a carbon removal program that will drastically improve soil fertility, explains Patel. Jalinga has been using compost from a special composting method (Novcom compost) in combination with manure to fertilize the tea plants for more than 15 years.
“We are continuously trying out new ways of creating compost with green matter available in the estate. We have an in-house lab that tests the compost, compost water, and soil regularly for microbial growth, microbial diversity. Nitrogen content is also measured off-site,” he said.
In a Facebook video, Patel explains that Jalinga follows the three pillars of climate-smart tea:
sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and income
adopting and building resilience to climate change
reducing and removing greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions
“Our policies are aligned with the 17 goals developed by the United Nations that aim for a better and more sustainable future for all,” he says.
Jalinga supplies private-label tea to more than 150 5-star hotels with exports to the UK, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, and soon Russia, Australia, and Japan.
Next up is a brand launch.
Meeting the India Tea Board mandate to produce earth-friendly tea at a profit while enhancing India’s ability to market quality tea ? Jalinga is leading the way.
“Currently tea needs a quarter million metric tons of Nitrogen from non-renewable methane; 138,000 metric tons of Potassium from fossil sources and 27,500 metric tons of Phosphorus to dig from fast-depleting reserves. Conventional farming has the tools to meet demand, but supplies are fast running out. Peak phosphorus comes in 2030,” according to Nigel Melican, founder Teacraft.
