The Tea Trade Body That Still Gives Away a Football Shield
In 1935 Indian planters won a seat on a colonial tax committee. Their association went on to fund a football trophy still contested in Jorhat today, and in September 2025 it was proposing a minimum price for green leaf to force bad tea out of the market.
On this page
- Twenty-two planters, a riverside namghat, and one seat on a committee
- The fifty-four-year gap in the record
- The shield that outlasted the committee
- September 2025: the same body, a different kind of standard
- The committee that once wanted a seat now wants a floor
- What the file shows, ninety years on
The Assam Tea Planters' Association was formed to win its members a seat on a tax committee. Within a few decades it was funding a football shield, and teams from around the region were making the trip to Jorhat to play for it.
That is the record, in order. Twenty-two Indian planters met at a namghat on the riverbank in 1935. The organization they built went on to sponsor a football tournament still contested at Jorhat Stadium, one a Manipur club won in 2025. As of September 2025 the same association was also in the news for something else entirely: proposing a floor price for green leaf, aimed squarely at forcing substandard tea out of the market. All three entries belong to the same file.
Twenty-two planters, a riverside namghat, and one seat on a committee
On 23 June 1935, twenty-two Indian planters assembled at the Amolapatty Namghat in Dibrugarh, a prayer hall on the bank of the Brahmaputra, for a preliminary meeting. Benudhar Rajkhowa chaired it.
They came out of it with a committee. Prasanna Kumar Barooah of Dibrugarh as chairman, Rajani Kanta Baruah as secretary, Rameswar Sahariya as treasurer, Jogendra Nath Barooah as assistant secretary, Karmabir Nabin Chandra Bardaloi as a member. Five names and a mandate.
The formal first general meeting followed in Dibrugarh on 28 October 1936, and that date is the one counted as the organization's birth. Forty-eight members, from different parts of the Brahmaputra Valley, turned up representing seventy-nine tea gardens1. They constituted themselves as the Assam Valley Indian Tea Planters Association, which became the Assam Tea Planters' Association.
What did the new body actually win? The right to nominate a member to the panel of the Tea Cess Committee, an official industry board. Not a manifesto. A seat, on a committee, that decided things about their own tea. By weight and measure, that was the first concrete asset ATPA ever held.
The fifty-four-year gap in the record
Organized planting in Assam already had an association, and had for some time. The Indian Tea Association describes itself as founded in 18812, "the premier and the oldest organization of tea producers in India." It was, and remains, the larger and older body.
So the arithmetic sits there for anyone who wants it. From 1881 to 1935 is fifty-four years in which organized Indian tea had a planters' association, and it was not one this state's own planters had built for themselves. In 1935 twenty-two of them built one. This office certifies the dates and declines to speculate past them. In September 2025, ninety years on, the Assam Tea Planters' Association was still standing in front of a microphone6, which is a claim about durability, not just about firsts.
The shield that outlasted the committee
A trade body for tea growers put up a football trophy, and it stuck. The Assam Tribune carries a standing tag for the tournament4 as a recurring fixture at Jorhat Stadium, and Business Standard, reporting on the 2016 edition, called it "one such few major football tournament that is played in Assam."3
By that 2016 account, "many reputed clubs from across the state" competed, and the final that year was decided between Oil India's own OIL XI and Shillong Lajong FC, a club from neighbouring Meghalaya, with OIL XI winning 3 to 1. A tea company's works team and a professional club from the next state over, on the same pitch, for a trophy a planters' association put up.
Nearly a decade later the shield was still being played for, now carrying a bank's name alongside ATPA's own: the 2025 final was billed as the Federal Bank ATPA Shield.5 Football 4 Change, a club from Manipur, beat Jorhat Town Club 3 to 1 at Jorhat Stadium, Houlungou scoring twice either side of a Jorhat Town reply, to take the tournament in 2025.
September 2025: the same body, a different kind of standard
On 12 September 2025, the Assam Tribune ran a piece headlined "Assam tea fail FSSAI norms, ATPA calls for urgent industry reforms."6 No football in it.
ATPA chairman Samudra P Baruva said the time had come for North India's tea, Assam and West Bengal both, "to make a decisive shift toward quality." His complaint was specific: a glut of tea failing India's food-safety standards was, in his account, pushing major buyers toward South Indian and African leaf instead. "Quality doesn't just mean taste," he said, "it means compliance with FSSAI standards."
The remedy ATPA proposed was not a slogan. It was a number: a minimum price of Rs 25 per kilogram, about US$0.30, for green leaf carrying at least 40 percent fine count (the proportion of tender, correctly-plucked leaf a factory actually wants). Below that price, Baruva argued, a bought-leaf factory has no reason to turn away inferior leaf. At the price he named, it would be compelled to reject it, and whatever a factory is not compelled to reject, it packs and sells: a floor low enough to buy bad leaf is a floor low enough to sell it to you, in the tin.
The committee that once wanted a seat now wants a floor
Small tea growers, family-scale operations distinct from the old colonial-era gardens, now supply nearly half of Assam's tea7, a state output that runs somewhere in the range of 630 to 700 million kg of made tea a year8, roughly 700,000 to 770,000 US tons. Most of that crop comes off holdings that were never part of the estate structure ATPA was built to represent in 1935.
Line the two moments up. In 1935, twenty-two planters organized because they wanted a nomination on a committee that decided things about their own tea. In 2025, the body they built was still trying to decide things about tea, only now the tool was a floor price rather than a seat, aimed at a market ATPA's founders never had to think about: bought-leaf factories buying from growers who are not members of any estate at all.
What the file shows, ninety years on
An association founded in 1935 to hold one nomination on a cess committee is now the body publicly proposing a price the market should refuse to go below.
The football is the surprising part of the record. The plain reading of it is that this was always a body of working planters looking after the industry's own standing, and a shield that draws a company works team, a neighbouring state's professional club, and a club from Manipur to the same pitch is one form of that, while a September press statement about a Rs 25 floor price is another.
The Tea Cess Committee seat is long since a footnote. The shield is still played for at Jorhat Stadium, and in 2025 a club from Manipur took it home. Both of those outlasted the meeting that started them, which is more than most committees manage.