How a journalist helped tea farmers rewrite their future in eastern Nagaland

When COVID-19 brought India to a standstill in 2020, award-winning journalist Manno Wangnao found herself stranded in her hometown of Tizit, a remote subdivision in eastern Nagaland’s Mon district.

For most, lockdown meant uncertainty. For Wangnao, it became an unexpected opportunity.

Instead of waiting for life to resume, she began asking the same question that had troubled her since childhood: Why were people in one of Nagaland’s oldest tea-growing regions still poor?

The answer, she would discover, lay not in the tea bushes carpeting the hillsides, but in an invisible web of information gaps, exploitative middlemen and bureaucratic exclusion that had quietly trapped generations of tea growers in debt.

Over the next few years, Wangnao helped hundreds of farmers navigate the Tea Board of India’s registration process, facilitated agricultural machinery, helped open the region’s first direct factory accounts for local tea growers with the support of Tea Board officials, and connected growers to government schemes they had never known existed.

Her efforts helped shift bargaining power towards farmers who had spent decades accepting whatever price was offered for their tea leaves.

A question that uncovered a broken system

Tea was never an unusual sight in Tizit. Cultivation began in the region in the early 1990s, when a handful of families, including Wangnao’s, started planting tea after learning from neighbouring Assam. Over time, tea gardens spread across villages in eastern Nagaland. Nearly every family cultivated a small plot.

Yet prosperity never followed.

Growing up as the daughter of a two-term legislator, Wangnao watched villagers arrive at her home almost daily seeking financial help — for hospital bills, school fees, funerals, weddings or simply food.

“In Nagaland, politics is personal,” she says. “People don’t just expect politicians to build roads. They expect them to stand by them in every crisis.”

As a child, she struggled to reconcile the reality around her.

“We had land. People worked hard. We had tea gardens,” she recalls. “So why were we still poor?”

The answers began to emerge when Wangnao started visiting tea farmers in villages. She sat with them and listened to the stories behind their harvests. The more conversations she had, the more she realised that tea itself was not the problem. The problem was everything that happened after the leaves left the fields.

Unlike neighbouring Assam, tea farming in eastern Nagaland had evolved in isolation. Thousands of smallholders grew tea, yet few understood how the industry functioned beyond their own gardens.

Every winter, when production declined, green leaf prices crashed to as little as ₹5 a kilogram. Even during the peak season, farmers rarely earned more than ₹17 or ₹18 a kilogram. Most families survived by taking advances from factory owners during the lean months, only to spend the next harvest repaying old debts.

The low prices were only part of the problem. Most farmers sold their leaves through a chain of middlemen, who collected leaves from villages, transported them to factories and took a commission before passing on the payment. Farmers had little idea what factories were actually paying.

“They kept telling me, ‘We don’t get good prices. We don’t receive any benefits. We’re surviving,’” Wangnao recalls.

Determined to find out what support was available, Wangnao went straight to the Tea Board’s zonal office in Jorhat, Assam, without an appointment or official contacts.

The officials were surprised. Few people from eastern Nagaland had approached them seeking information about tea cultivation, and none of them was a woman. Wangnao peppered them with questions about registration, subsidies, pricing and government support.

What they told her was simple but revealing: farmers needed to register with the Tea Board. Without registration, they could not access machinery subsidies, training programmes, technical assistance or government schemes designed to support small tea growers.

Almost no tea grower in Tizit was formally registered with the Tea Board of India.

“If people from your area don’t come to us, how will we know what they need?” officials asked.

For Wangnao, it was a turning point. The problem was not that support did not exist. It was that farmers had never been connected to the institutions created to support them.

Bringing farmers into the system

Returning from Jorhat, Wangnao made Tea Board registration her priority.

Farmers needed an Aadhaar card, passport-sized photographs, bank account details, a No Objection Certificate from village authorities confirming ownership of the tea garden, and a map of the plantation. Many older growers did not have bank accounts or the necessary documents.

Wangnao helped them gather the paperwork, encouraged them to open bank accounts and worked with village authorities to issue the required certificates.

The work was painstaking. Applications had to be checked, corrected and resubmitted whenever officials sought additional information. The Tea Board’s zonal office in Jorhat handled applications from several northeastern states, making the process slow.

“I always told them, ‘Give me at least three years to improve your conditions,’” she says. “If we want to build something good, it takes patience and dedication.”

The first registrations came through. Farmers received biometric identity cards, making them officially recognised tea growers for the first time.

Word spread from one village to another. By the time Wangnao stepped back from the process, around 1,300 farmers had been registered.

“What made me happiest was that other people started doing it too,” she says. “Once they saw it worked, they didn’t need me anymore. The community took ownership.”

Breaking the middlemen’s monopoly

Nearly every farmer in Tizit sold green leaves through middlemen from neighbouring Assam. The traders collected tea from villages, transported it to factories, mostly in Assam, and paid farmers only after deducting their commission.

Few growers knew the prevailing factory rate or realised how much money was being lost before payment reached them.

“The farmers knew they were being exploited,” Wangnao says. “They would tell me, ‘We don’t get good prices.’”

During discussions with Tea Board officials, she learnt about direct factory accounts.

“If you have a direct factory account, you take your leaves straight to the factory and the payment comes directly to you,” she says.

No one from her region had taken that route before. The first few direct factory accounts were eventually opened through Wangnao’s initiative, creating a precedent for other farmers.

For the first time, growers knew the daily factory rate. They could negotiate with confidence instead of accepting whatever price local traders quoted.

“Once people knew the actual market rate, they understood the value of what they were producing,” she says.

Then came an unexpected boost.

When the COVID-19 lockdown disrupted tea plucking across Assam, factories faced a shortage of green leaves. Buyers increasingly turned to Nagaland to meet demand. Competition among factories grew, and prices rose sharply.

Farmers who had once sold leaves for ₹5 to ₹18 a kilogram were now earning around ₹50 a kilogram.

The higher prices transformed household finances. Concrete houses replaced many bamboo homes. Families could educate their children without borrowing money. Women, who had long carried much of the responsibility for tea cultivation, gained greater financial independence.

“A lot of women are buying scooters now,” Wangnao says. “Earlier, they worked in the gardens but didn’t have that kind of financial freedom.”

Government support also began reaching the region. Through Tea Board schemes, nine farmer groups received agricultural machinery worth around ₹56 lakh, including tea harvesters, grass cutters and motorised sprayers. Around 180 farmers directly benefited from the equipment, while many more gained through improved productivity and shared resources.

Ngipying Konyak, 34, who owns a small tea garden, says the change has been significant.

“Earlier, the price we received for our tea was very low. We were in debt and lived with constant anxiety. It was very difficult to run the household. We often couldn’t pay the labourers working in our tea garden on time.

“Things have changed now. We can pay our workers, and I have built a pucca house. I have cleared the debts I used to take every Christmas. Life has improved. I can now travel and even buy clothes for myself.”

Perhaps the biggest change was that Wangnao’s work no longer depended on her alone. As more growers recognised the benefits of registration and direct market access, community members began helping others complete applications and navigate the system.

For Wangnao, that was the real measure of success.

“I never wanted people to depend on me,” she says. “I wanted them to know how the system worked so they could do it themselves.”

A harvest beyond tea

For Wangnao, improving prices was never the finish line. She believes the next challenge is ensuring that the tea they grow is healthy — for both people and the environment.

She has become an outspoken advocate of organic cultivation, warning farmers against the indiscriminate use of chemical herbicides and pesticides. One of her biggest concerns is glyphosate-based weed killers.

“We are a tea-drinking society,” she says. “Tea is something people consume every day. It should be free from harmful chemicals. That should be non-negotiable.”

She also works to inform villagers about how chemicals can pollute water sources and affect the health of labourers who apply them.

Her advocacy extends beyond Tizit. Churches, village councils and community organisations across Nagaland regularly invite her to speak about tea cultivation, entrepreneurship and sustainable agriculture. She has become a resource person for aspiring tea growers, sharing everything from Tea Board procedures to green tea processing techniques.

In the coming months, she plans to conduct training sessions in Mon district on green tea production, allowing farmers to earn more by selling a value-added product rather than raw leaves.

Zinghat, 58, a tea farmer from Tizit, says the training has already changed how he approaches cultivation.

“I have a small tea garden. I can sustain my family from it now, which was not the case earlier. I have also attended training programmes organised at Jorhat Agricultural University where we learned how to make green tea.”

Zinghat once sold his tea leaves to middlemen. Now, he supplies directly to a factory.

“I also make handmade green tea. I don’t use chemicals, weed killers or pesticides in my tea garden. I have also received a grass-cutting machine from Wangnao,” he adds.

Wangnao recently launched Wangnao Green Tea, named after her family, and was selected by the Tea Board of India to represent Nagaland at a tea marketing event in Delhi. She hopes to establish a small organic CTC processing unit in Tizit to produce chemical-free black and masala tea sourced entirely from local farmers.

“My goal isn’t to make money,” she says. “My goal is to make the best tea.”

She believes modern agriculture has become too focused on maximising production and profits at the expense of people and the environment.

“What we need is a reset,” she says. “We’ve become obsessed with producing more and making more money. But if money becomes the only goal, you’ll end up exploiting people.”

Instead, she argues, governments should invest continuously in farmer training, ethical cultivation practices and knowledge-sharing.

For Wangnao, the journey that began with a childhood question has come full circle.

Today, tea bushes still stretch across the hills of Tizit as they have for decades. But many of the people tending them no longer see themselves as anonymous growers at the end of a supply chain. They know the value of their crop, understand the system that governs it and have begun shaping their own future.

For Wangnao, that is the real harvest — not just better tea, but a community that finally knows its own worth.

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