Trinitea

TRINITEA is one of the India’s major tea smallholder support programme developed jointly by global sustainability organisation, Solidaridad and Indian Tea Association - the premier and the oldest organisation of tea producers in India. The programme aims to transform the tea smallholder segment in India while taking care of the social and environmental issues. The tea smallholders are emerging as the leading supplier of green leaf in India and TRINITEA seeks to enhance the competitiveness of the Indian tea smallholders. TRINITEA Programme of ITA and SOLIDARIDAD seeks to provide year-round on-ground training to improve agronomical, social and environmental practices of the smallholders. TRINITEA programme has tied up with all major tea smallholders associations in the country for providing better services to their members. The programme implements a TRINITEA framework which is a digital self-assessment tool tailor-made for smallholders in the Indian tea industry. The assessment provides a high degree of assurance to the farmers, buying factories, the tea packers as well as consumers on social, agronomical and environmental aspects of tea production. TRINITEA will focus on consolidating the ongoing support to smallholders. Our Objectives 1) To improve the social, economic, agronomic and environmental performances of 60,000 of all STGs families across India. 2) To set up a multi-stakeholder governance mechanism for making smallholder production more competitive. 3) To support tea packers to source traceable and safe tea from the smallholders and the estates. DIGITAL TRINITEA ASSESSMENTS The TRINITEA self-assessment framework is available in the form of a simple android application in Bengali, Tamil, Assamese and English language. The TRINITEA framework is available for download from its website www.trini-tea.org, or a hardcopy could be picked up from one of the Solidaridad’s Farm Support Centres as well as ITA branch offices. The Trinitea framework consists of 10 chapters measuring producer’s performance on topics ranging from soil and water management, good harvesting methods, integrated pest management, fertiliser use and crop protection, labour conditions and environmental management. Successful filling-up of the information presented in the form of numbers of questions and an easy scoring mechanism would provide individual producers or a group of producers on how they are performing.