No Deaths, a Dozen Injured, Tea Factory Damage Minor

Guwahati | Assam

A strong earthquake followed by several aftershocks rattled rafters and nerves on April 28 but caused only minor damage to tea processing factories throughout the region. Several estates reported damage to outbuildings and dwellings for workers. There were 12 injuries, none life-threatening, following the 30-second shake at 7:51 am April 28.

The quake was felt throughout northeaster Assam, parts of Bihar, West Bengal, and Bangladesh. Damage was reported within a 100-kilometer radius in Sonitpur, Nagaon, and Guwahati.

“We were lucky to have got away with no injuries to employees and their dependents from member gardens,” said Bhupinder Singh, chairman of the Assam Branch India Tea Association (ITA) Zone 3.

A hill collapsed in Bhirabkund in the Udalguri district due to soil liquefaction caused by the quake and area residents were warn to be wary of land slides and damage to local bridges.

“The high-intensity earthquake early Wednesday caused damage to houses and buildings with people running out of their homes and other places in panic, obliterating social distancing and other COVID guidelines amid a raging pandemic. The massive quake has caused only light damage to buildings and there have been no fatalities reported,” writes Prof. T.G. Sitharam, director of IIT Guwahati and president of the Indian Society for Earthquake Technology.

The heritage bungalow at Durrung Tea Estate “stood firm and intact,” said Mrityunjay Jalan. At Kopati Tea Estate, Rohit Pareek said he was in the factory at the time of the quake “when everything started shaking for a good 30 seconds. Jolts were so massive that the ceiling of our packet tea house cracked immediately and we rescued our workers. There were aftershocks for one hour and when it calmed we started our factory

During the first 48 hours there were 15 aftershocks measuring 2 to 4.9 on the Richter Scale. The quake caused many fissures, exposing liquified soil within a radius of 50-70 kilometers. 

Every year the Indian Plate moves roughly 5 centimeters northward, pushing under the Eurasian Plate and forming the Himalayas. The Seven Sisters (Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur) are considered by seismologists to be the sixth most earthquake-prone belt in the world.

The region’s last major quake, in July 1960, measured 6.0. The epicenter of a 5.9 quake in November 2011 was in Myanmar about 130 km from the city of Imphal, capital of the sate of Manipur. The region experienced two of its worst earthquakes in 1897 and 1950. 1897 quake measured 8.0 and Each killed 1500. The magnitude 8.6 quake in August 1950, with an epicenter in Arunachal Pradesh, killed an estimated 4,800.

Quake Damage

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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.

This effort is part of the crowdsourced $100 million Coronavirus Relief Fund.

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.

Learn more about Doctors for You

UNICEF

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.

Learn more about UNICEF

Indian Red Cross Society

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.

Lear more about Indian Red Cross Society

Mission Oxygen

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.

Learn more about Mission Oxygen

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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.

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. 

• Related: Climate Friendly Processing of Tea.

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.

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