NEW DELHI: Its fragrant, delicately flavoured leaves have enthralled Britain's tea drinkers for generations, but stocks of Darjeeling tea are being threatened as India's ethnic Gurkhas fight for a separate state in the Darjeeling hills of West Bengal.

The demand for ‘Gorkhaland’, a separate political and administrative unit to be carved out from the Gurkha populated districts of West Bengal state, has enforced a total shutdown in the Darjeeling hills since Aug 3. For the past 10 days, Gurkha men, women and children have taken over the winding roads and hill habitations in the 3,150 sq km (1,200 sq mile) region, stopping traffic, closing shops and restaurants, and preventing all economic activity.

Even though the tea industry has been “exempted” from the shutdown, the knock-on effect could mean losing two months of tea production.

The Indian Tea Association holding an emergency meeting in Kolkata on Tuesday as tea companies deal with the crisis.

“It's an extremely worrisome situation,” said Manojit Dasgupta, the secretary-general of the association. “All the 74 operational tea estates in the region are facing insurmountable problems. At risk is the entire July and August production of Darjeeling tea, amounting to nearly 3m kilos. This is around a third of the region's annual production.”

This is the region that was once ruled by the Gurkha kings of Nepal until it was annexed and incorporated into British India in the 19th century.

Not coincidentally, this is also the region where, in 1841, a Scottish doctor named Campbell, the superintendent of a local sanatorium, planted seeds stolen from China to create Darjeeling's first experimental tea garden.

Darjeeling's terrain and climate, at an altitude of around 6,700ft (2,000m), were perfect for the transplantation of the Chinese Camellia sinensis tea. It did not take long for the tea rooms of London to acknowledge the superior quality of Darjeeling leaf, which came to be known as “the champagne among teas.

On Monday, the Gorkha People's Liberation Front (Gorkha Janmukti Morcha — GJM) announced a three-day let-up in action from Aug 16 to 18. But there has also been talk that the fight for a separate state will take a new form with a kind of “curfew” descending on the Darjeeling hills. The entire population of 1.8 million is being asked to remain indoors.

“In a worst-case scenario, we face the prospect of huge losses at a time of peak production, threatening our future operations,” said Dasgupta.

Dasgupta said the action meant trucks with coal supplies used in furnaces to turn the green tea leaves to black tea are failing to get through. The supply of rice to tea gardens has also stopped and with pickers partly paid in rice, the picking of the leaves could be delayed. Finally almost 65 per cent of Darjeeling's annual tea production is exported but the black tea is currently stuck in the factories. “The factories have limited storage space, and have to take the tea out,” said Dasgupta.

Nick Gandon, the director of the UK-based Reginald Ames tea merchants and brokers, said the action in Darjeeling would inevitably disrupt the market and lead to a rise in the price of the tea.

“Production is still continuing but it's only going to go on for a little while longer because everyone's coal stocks are running pretty low,” he said. “As soon as they run out, they're not going to be able to manufacture and that's going to have an impact on prices. If you miss out on a week's worth of production, you've still got to pay the workers and there's not going to be that tea to sell. When it does start selling again, there's going to be a lot of people wanting it, so it's going to push prices up.”

But Gandon, who also sits on the board of the UK Tea Council, said the effects of the strike were unlikely to be felt by the overwhelming majority of tea drinkers in the Britain.

“It won't affect the bog-standard teabag market,” he said. “The UK tea market is about 96 per cent teabags and it's not going to touch that at all; it's only going to affect the speciality market. It will affect that a bit, but if it's only another week, you're probably talking a few pennies a box. If it's another month, it might be a bit more.”

There is only one silver lining to the gloom in the tea gardens — the tea presently lying in the factories and on shrubs is what's known as “rains tea”, an inferior grade of “monsoon tea” used largely in blends. The superior “first flush” and “second flush” Darjeeling teas from this year's production are already in the international market.

By arrangement with the Guardian