Guwahati: The North Eastern Tea Association (NETA) will confer the ‘Lifetime Achievement Awards’ to two distinguished personalities of Assam— Apurba Kumar Barooah and Sagar Mehta— in recognition of their extraordinary achievements, commitment and dedication to the tea industry and social fabric of Assam.
The awards will be conferred on February 8 at Golaghat during the “Chairman’s Dinner”, which is a biennial event of NETA.
The event is expected to be a good gathering of several stakeholders of the tea industry – tea producers, buyers, auctioneers, small tea growers, and tea scientists.
“NETA will confer the lifetime achievement award to Apurba Kumar Barooah, the social statesman, for providing visionary leadership for the betterment of society,” said Ajay Dhandharia, Chairman of NETA.
Dhandharia also said NETA will confer the Lifetime Achievement Award to Sagar Mehta for his exemplary contribution to the tea industry.
Mehta is now the oldest serving tea garden executive in India.
After a year-long course in labour management at the All India Institute of Personnel Management, Calcutta, he joined as an executive at Duncan Brothers & Company Ltd. and was among the first batch of Indian officers recruited by the British in tea then.
He joined the Gandhapara Tea Estate in the Dooars region in 1954 and thus started his 70-year tryst with tea.
In 1965, during his tenure as Manager of Kilcotta Tea Estate in Dooars, he was awarded the Tea Board of India’s top recognition for tea grown in the Dooars. He is also the president of Badulipar Tea Company.
Apurba Kumar Barooah’s life has been interspersed with a bouquet of experiences drawn from different facets of life — from being a pioneer of the cooperative movement in Assam to being a well-known journalist, tea planter, poet, writer, and founder of Golaghat’s first weekly newspaper ‘Saptahik Dhansiri’.
Barooah made immense contributions to NETA during its founding years.
He had also started Tea News, a one-of-a-kind monthly magazine, to highlight the achievements, concerns, and hopes of the state’s tea industry.
He has also written a handbook in Assamese for small tea growers of Assam to encourage more and more youth to engage with the industry.
Barooah is a storehouse of information about the past of Golaghat town,
its veteran residents, and the history and contribution of the town toward the freedom
movement and Assam’s tea industry.
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NETA in the past conferred the title of “Tea Doyen” to Hemendra Prasad Barooah in 2017.
“NETA is honoured and privileged to confer lifetime achievement awards to two great personalities. Both of them have crossed 93 years of age. Their contributions shall continue to motivate generations to come and shall always be remembered with great honour and dignity,” said Bidyananda Barkakoty, Adviser NETA.
