Everest Tea Estate

June 2000. Vol 2. No 07- Kathmandu, Nepal.

                                              'Tea Outside Tea Zone'

         Experience of a tea enterprise outside the declared tea zone. Professor, Som Prasad Gauchan and his team did not actually have tea in mind when they were looking for a plot of land. They were thinking of some herbs, tea being only one of the possibilities. When they spotted a plot of 100 or 150 ropanis of land some 10 km north of Sankhu, Kathmandu, with a wild growth of tea (there were no bushes but trees), they decided to give tea a try, and acquired 500 ropanis of land nearby on lease for thirty years.

        They initially planted the saplings in around 50 ropanis, but found that the local people on the prompting of some local politicians, had uprooted all the plants within a couple of days. The locals also filed a writ against Gauchan’s company (Everest Tea Estate Pvt. Ltd.–ETE). Now after a prolonged court battle, the company, however, won the case in the Supreme Court.

        While the case was going on, the company some six years back found another plot (1500 ropanis) nearby but in Sindhupalchok district and started tea cultivation there. Some of the plants have now started yielding crop. In the Kathmandu garden, there is only a nursery now. "As soon as we complete the work in Sin-dhupalchok, we’ll start work in Kathmandu", says Gauchan.
ETE has five partners including Gauchan and the investment in it has totaled now to Rs. 7.5 million, according to Gauchan. They have not taken any loan from a bank.
          

        As of now, ETE has no tea-processing machine, and whatever leaves are being produced are being processed by hand. "And if we’re able to convince the buyers about this fact, we hope they will like it more, as handmade is becoming a fad in western countries", Gauchan says. However, hand-processing is not going to be feasible once the volume of work becomes really big when all the plants in the garden start giving leaves, he explains. Therefore, ETE is now planning to put up a medium scale machine to process tea.