This blogger has decided to stop drinking Tea

Maybe stopping is an extreme step but I would request the readers to reduce tea intake (as also coffee). It so happened I was at Valparai (4hours from Coimbatore) sometime back, it is located right in the middle of verdant Western Ghats. Now I am an early riser and prefer going for long morning walks (stories associated with morning walk are many would like to post one of these days!) except in cities. Mountains and mountains of what was supposed to be thick jungle is reduced to tea estate (later that day I went to sholayar dam sight, the route took an hour of bumpy ride and all along it was acres of tea estate), it depressed me a lot. This is biodiversity grave yard. In biodiversity terms this is a massacre unprecedented. The loss if calculated in money is billions and billions. All for a cup of tea!. Another passion of colonial morons that has been passed on, it is a shame. Infact the foreign exchange earning of India from tea is the highest. And who are the people who are drinking this tea?. India accounts for one-third of global tea production and most of these are imported by European countries, most Indians use the cheaper variety.

So next time you have that cup of tea think of the environmental cost. Maybe you will not feel like drinking. And yes maybe it is also the time to reclaim the land from the estate and start giving back to the forest. All through out my travel I didn’t really see much wildlife, they have been pushed out. Need to add I did spot a pied kingfisher (my first) and scimitar babbler, and some wild mongoose. It was a very saddening experience.

I do take herbal/ organic tea sometimes, but I am trying to find out the location of the origin. Is it difficult to ask these products to mention where they are grown and what is the environmental cost?. I as a consumer would like to know these.

PS. same is the case of rubber plantations but then rubber has some necessity, cannot be avoided. The picture below taken few kms away from plantations shows what should have been.