In Rural India, Tea Is Gaining Sustainable Development Ground

GUWAHATI, India — Ketan Patel, managing director of the first carbon neutral certified tea estate in the world, has spent nearly a decade pioneering a way forward using ethical and organic practices.

Patel’s 650-hectare tea garden at Jalinga Estate in India’s tea capital of Assam now exports 100 percent of its organic products and has won numerous sustainability awards along the way. The estate, purchased by his family in the early ‘60s, now protects several hundred hectares of forest that isn’t farmed and is in the process of switching to solar power and phasing out the use of coal in its tea processing — but Patel doesn’t plan to stop there.