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, on the Tocklai river at Jorhat: the Tocklai Tea Research Institute, the world's oldest tea research station, founded as a single chemist's post in 1891 and formalized as a station in 1911. Almost every clone in an Assam garden, the pest treatment sprayed on it, and the theaflavin count a taster reads off the finished leaf trace back to work done at this one address. What follows is the record of the institute itself: how it started, how it is organized, what it has released, and what it is releasing now.

1891 to 1911: from a chemist's post 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 Bamber, to investigate the plant's cultivation and chemistry. Bamber's brief ran for two decades before the industry gave the work a permanent home. In 1911 the association opened the Tocklai Experimental Station on the bank of the Tocklai river at Cinnamara, on Jorhat's southern edge: a laboratory and two bungalows, paid for by the tea industry and subsidized by the government of India and the provincial administrations of Assam and Bengal. An Assamese-language account of the founding gives the same two dates independently: the center opened in 1911 in partnership with the Indian Tea Association, and the coordinating body that would run it, the Tea Research Association, was formed in 1964 to bring the work under one roof.

The mother garden: Cinnamara's seed

The station's own address supplied more than land. 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 Estate next door, 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 still grows on the Tocklai grounds today, on ground that once belonged to the estate the British auctioned off after they hanged him.

One station, then an association

The Tocklai Experimental Station kept its founding name for over a century of work before an administrative change caught up with its reputation. In May 2014 the Tea Research Association's Council of Management passed a formal resolution renaming the station the Tocklai Tea Research Institute, replacing every letterhead, banner, and signboard on site. The institute's director at the time framed the change as recognition of standing already earned: by then the station was routinely described, including by its own parent body, as one of the oldest and largest tea research institutes in the world. The Tea Research Association itself, formed in 1964 to run Tocklai and extend its reach across northeast India, remains the umbrella; the institute at Jorhat is its flagship, alongside a second, smaller center, the North Bengal Regional Research and Development Centre at Nagrakata, West Bengal, that extends the same research programme into the Dooars and Terai.

Eleven divisions, one mandate

The institute organizes its work into eleven research divisions, each with its own brief:

Plant Improvement is the division most Assam readers of this record have already met without knowing its name: it is the office behind the TV clone line and the biclonal seed stocks this record documents in full elsewhere. Pest and Disease Management is the office behind the reduviid-bug and termiticide work this record has also certified separately. Every division answers to the same institute; the split exists so that a soil problem and a genetics problem are never handled by the same small team.

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 count it has released 211 clones and 14 biclonal seed varieties across its full history, TV clones for general planting plus separate garden-series lines bred for Darjeeling and the Dooars, alongside triploid and drought-tolerant releases in more recent decades. That is the headline count only. What a clone actually is, why an Assam garden replaced its old seed jat with one, and what the industry may have lost by doing so are questions this record answers at length in the linked article on the clones themselves, and the case for keeping a biclonal seed alternative alive is argued in its own linked record too.

The reach: who the institute actually answers to

Tocklai is not a laboratory that publishes and waits to be read. The Tea Research Association runs an advisory service, ten branch offices deep, that reaches an estimated 1,100 large tea estates and more than 200,000 small tea growers across northeast India, the routine channel through which a clone recommendation, a pest alert, or a soil test result actually reaches a garden manager. The institute also runs a NABL-accredited testing laboratory open to the trade, a model tea factory that visitors can walk through, and a small tea museum on the Jorhat grounds, alongside guest rooms in a colonial-era bungalow built in 1930.

The record continues

A station built in 1911 has not stopped producing. 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 tea and pitched by the association's own secretary as a domestic answer to Japan's supply-constrained matcha market. 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, one more instrument added to a Plant Improvement toolkit that has run continuously since TV1. As of the association's 2025 annual general meeting, the institute had also joined the Tea Board of India in asking the European Union for a five-year transition period on tightened pesticide residue limits, the same regulatory pressure this record has already certified as a threat to Assam's own export trade.

Sources

1. Achievements, Tea Research Association (Tocklai) (the TV clone and biclonal seed stock release timeline, by decade).
2. Areas of Research, Tea Research Association (Tocklai) (the eleven research divisions and their briefs).
3. Tea Research Association (the advisory network's reach, the North Bengal centre, and the association's structure).
4. Tocklai Tea Research Institute, Wikipedia (the institute's founding year and location).
5. Experimental Station Renamed as Tocklai Tea Research Institute, Business Standard, PTI (the May 2014 renaming resolution).
6. Assam's Tocklai Tea Board Launches Antioxidant-Rich Green Tea With 75% Less Caffeine, The Assam Tribune (the September 2025 decaffeinated tea and AI germplasm-tool launches, the scientists and quotes credited).
7. Tocklai Tea Research Institute, Jorhat District, Government of Assam (the founding date and the site's visitor facilities).
8. A Tour of the Tocklai Tea Research Institute, Teabox Blog (the 1891 Kelway Bamber appointment, the Cinnamara mother-plant connection to Maniram Dewan's estate, and the advisory reach to over 1,000 estates).
9. অসমৰ চাহশিল্প (Assam's Tea Industry), Axom the Peerless Land, in Assamese (an independent Assamese-language account of the 1911 founding and the 1964 formation of the Tea Research Association).