Spotlight | Frugal Innovation on the Farm

Capital-intensive advances in agricultural technology—ag-tech—are altering the efficiency and economics of cultivation. However, unlike commodity food crops, tea remains stubbornly labor-intensive. Tea plants are long-lived and require extensive infrastructure, including drainage improvements, flood protection, terracing, and planting shade trees. Fieldwork involves heavy fertilizer use, four-year pruning cycles, uprooting old stock, and maintaining extensive paths and access roads. Harvest rounds yielding 50 or fewer kilos of leaf per worker occur every eight to ten days during much of the year.

Abhijeet Hazarika, the former Head of Tea Process Innovation at Tata Global Beverages, explains that because every aspect of tea production is labor-intensive, tea is on the threshold of transformation, as mechanization and automation demonstrate. Since capital is limited and the return on investment is not substantial, Hazarika has made himself a champion of frugal innovation.

BIO Abhijeet Hazarika began his career in tea in the early 1980s in the Calcutta saleroom at Brooke Bond, Ltd. He joined Tata Tea in 1991 and worked in tea buying and blending in Guwahati, Bangalore, and Kolkata for 18 years before moving to London, where he worked for nearly seven years in product management and supply management for Tata Global Beverages. He has a home in Bangalore and has worked as a tea and process innovation consultant at T Sigma Consultancy based in Assam for five years.

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