A Fifth-Generation Assam Planter, Bidyananda Barkakoty, Takes a Heritage Award in Kolkata

Bidyananda Barkakoty, a fifth-generation Assam tea planter and adviser to the North Eastern Tea Association, a growers' body, received the ASSOCHAM Legacy and Heritage Excellence Award 2026 in Kolkata on June 24.

The award was presented at the first Growth Driven Family Business Conclave and Excellence Awards, held at Hotel Vivanta in Kolkata, by Swapan Dasgupta, the finance minister of West Bengal, Northeast News reported. It cited the Barkakoty family as one of the oldest tea-planting lineages in Assam, carried across five generations.

Readers of the season's crop reports already know the name: Barkakoty is the grower most often quoted on how the first and second flush have come in, and has been for years. That standing did not come from the award. A mechanical engineer who runs his own gardens in Golaghat, he chaired the North Eastern Tea Association for six years and still serves it as adviser, and he spent a year, April 2016 to March 2017, as vice chairman of the Tea Board of India, the government body that regulates the trade he is now asked to explain.

The honour is for the line, not a single garden. Assam's tea industry was built largely under British planters from 1839 on, and an Indian planting family carried five generations deep is a thread of the region's own hold on the crop, the sort the site traces back to Maniram Dewan, the first Indian to plant tea in Assam. Five generations is a long time to keep a family in the same leaf.

Sources: Northeast News, "Assam tea veteran Bidyananda Barkakoty receives ASSOCHAM Legacy & Heritage Excellence Award" (June 2026); Business Standard, "Bidyananda Barkakoty appointed as new vice-chairman of Tea Board" (9 February 2016).