The Tocklai Institute
The Tocklai Tea Research Institute at Jorhat, the world's oldest tea research station: from India's first tea chemist in 1891 to the Tocklai Experimental Station of 1911, what its eleven divisions do, and the science it has produced since.
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This office certifies the cup. It does not run the trials that decide what goes into the bush in the first place. That work belongs to one address, at Jorhat: the Tocklai Tea Research Institute, the world's oldest tea research station, created as the Tocklai Experimental Station in 1911, two decades after organized tea research in India began with a single chemist's appointment in 1891.
1891 to 1911: from a chemist to a station
The organized search for a scientific answer to Assam's tea problems began in 1891, when the Indian Tea Association and the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of Bengal jointly appointed a chemist, M. Kelway Bamber5, to investigate the plant's cultivation and chemistry. In 1911 the Tocklai Experimental Station opened at Jorhat4.
The mother garden: Cinnamara's seed
Tocklai's first cloned tea plant, released in 1949 and known ever since as TV1, was raised from an Assam-China hybrid grown from seed collected at the Cinnamara Tea Estate9, the same garden the Assamese planter Maniram Dewan had established in the 1840s, before the British hanged him for backing the revolt of 1857 and auctioned his estate to the planter George Williamson. The mother bush behind TV1 grows on the Tocklai grounds.
One station, then an association
In May 2014 the Tea Research Association's Council of Management passed a formal resolution renaming the station the Tocklai Tea Research Institute6, replacing every letterhead, banner, and signboard on site. The Tea Research Association, formed in 1964, runs the institute at Jorhat and a regional research and development centre at Nagrakata, West Bengal.
Eleven divisions
The institute organizes its work into eleven research divisions2, each with its own brief:
| Division | What it does |
|---|---|
| Plant Improvement | Breeds and releases tea cultivars: clones, seed stocks, and hybrid varieties |
| Biotechnology | Micropropagation, DNA fingerprinting, and gene-expression research |
| Agronomy | Harvesting, mechanization, nutrient management, winter dormancy physiology |
| Organic Tea | Sustainable cultivation methods, including vermicomposting |
| Water Management | Drainage, flood, and erosion control using remote sensing and GIS |
| Tea Soils | Soil degradation and rehabilitation |
| Climate Research | Resilience to a changing climate, studied under Open Top Chambers |
| Pest and Disease Management | Biological control agents and integrated pest strategies |
| Biochemistry | The physicochemical changes tea leaf undergoes during manufacture |
| Analytical Services | Soil and residue testing, run through a NABL-accredited laboratory |
| Tea Processing and Manufacturing | Operates a model tea factory to trial new machinery and methods |
The clone record, in brief
Plant Improvement's headline output is the TV series: vegetatively propagated clones, numbered in order of release, starting with TV1 in 1949 and running to TV31, cleared after multi-locational testing in the 2000s. By the institute's own record1 it has released the 31 numbered TV clones, dozens of garden-series selections, and a set of biclonal seed varieties across its full history.
The reach
The Tea Research Association runs an advisory service, ten branch offices deep, that reaches an estimated 1,100 large tea estates and more than 200,0003 small tea growers. The institute also runs a NABL-accredited testing laboratory open to the trade, a model tea factory, and a tea museum on the Jorhat grounds, alongside guest rooms in a colonial-era bungalow built in 19308.
Recent releases
In September 2025, at the Tea Research Association's 61st annual general meeting in Kolkata, institute scientists Padma Pallav and Himanshu Deka released a decaffeinated green tea powder made from three of Tocklai's own elite clones, TV9, TV11, and TV12, carrying 75 percent less caffeine than a conventional green tea7. At the same meeting, a separate team, Shuvam Dutta, Pritom Choudhury, and Sangita Borchetia, launched a patented, AI-based germplasm characterization tool that predicts a tea plant's drought tolerance from image analysis.