Reference: Indian tea industry brews new strategy, Bangkok Post, September 4, 2007

The article states that a problem faced by the Indian tea industry is that it has to compete with cheap and inferior products from newcomers to the tea industry like Bangladesh. This view is incompatible with history as we know it. The British began tea cultivation in northeastern British India in the 1850s. There was no Bangladesh then. Some of these tea estates were developed in the parts that became Bangladesh and some in parts that became India. In the partition of 1947 some of these tea estates went to Pakistan and subsequently to Bangladesh after the civil war of 1971. The Bangladeshis are not newcomers to the tea industry and they are not different from the Indians in that regard since both of these countries inherited their tea gardens from the British. They grow the same kind of tea, speak the same language, eat the same kind of food, and listen to the same music because they are really the same people and they are cultivating the same tea. They are separated only by an arbitrary and artificial political line that does not in any way affect the quality of tea.

Cha-am Jamal