tea states

Tika Basnet's hands move with speed and dexterity over the tender shoots of the tea bushes. She gathers clumps of leaves and casually flicks them into the doko on her back. Tika and her husband grow tea on their five hectares of land at Nepaltar in Ilam.
In the past ten years as Ilam's tea has won fame and recognition around the world, families like the Basnets have benefited as they switch from subsistence farming to tea as a cash crop.
Today, tea gardens surrounding Ilam bajar stretch downhill through the valley to the river, draping the hillsides with an emerald carpet. The tea industry now directly benefits 7,000 families and tens of thousands of people have benefited from investing in their own private tea estates. There are more than 100 private plantations at Nepaltar alone.
With Darjeeling across the border, Ilam has just the right soil and climate conditions for tea. But it hasn't always been rosy; Ilam still suffers from an identity crisis and it has been difficult to penetrate an increasingly fussy international market.
A few years ago, 30,000kg of tea was sent back from Mumbai because the chemical content was too high. "But that was a blessing in disguise because today, farmers and tea companies have switched to organic tea in a big way," says RC Nepal, manager of the Himalayan Shangri-La Tea.
Initially, local farmers didn't want to stop using chemicals but they've come around. "Although chemicals make the tea grow faster, I've realised it's healthier to use organic fertilisers," says Krishna Bahadur Basnet, a local tea farmer who grows tea on 6.5 hectares. "Since I stopped using chemicals, I've seen leeches, beetles and snakes in my garden again. Now I know that the chemicals were killing them."
Many farmers are now ardent supporters of the organic cause. "They said I should stop selling chemical fertilisers," says Gobinda Katuwal, proprietor of the only shop in Nepaltar that still sells chemical fertilisers.
Factories periodically send inspectors to check private gardens for traces of chemicals, and if they find any, stop buying from that garden. "Our target markets are in Europe, mostly Germany and France," says Nepal. "These buyers are really strict about chemical residues."