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Organic tea cultivation is a most emerging farming activity in recent years. Assam is only the state of India, where the highest tea is produced. Organic tea farming is a new concept for the state Assam. The study focuses on to estimate the technical efficiency level of organic tea growers.  The Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) is used to estimate the efficiency level of the growers by conducting a survey in Dibrugarh district of Assam, where the highest organic tea growers are concentrated. The study found- Mean technical efficiency of organic tea growers is 0.91. The variables organic fertilizer, organic pesticide, manure, machine and land area under tea cultivation are found statistically significant. On the other hand the variable labour man days found insignificant result with output.

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India, the land of spices is one of the major exporters and consumers of black pepper. India lost its top position 20 years ago in pepper production despite the land of origin. Black pepper is cultivated commercially in southern states and on a small scale in north eastern India at present. The farmers started cultivation of black pepper in north eastern states way back. Initially the production from North east India contributed only 1% of country’s total production but currently it is one of the major pepper producers contributing 10% of total production. The North eastern region provides tremendous scope for the cultivation because of diverse agro-climate, well-distributed rainfall, and fertile virgin land. Even though north east India is bestowed with ample of natural resources, growers are still not able to harness them efficiently. This paper discusses the current scenario, constraints, and future thrust of pepper production in the north eastern region.

We employed an Illumina-based high throughput metagenomics sequencing approach to unveil the overall rhizospheric as well as endophytic microbial community associated with an organically grown Camellia population located at the Experimental Tea Garden, Assam Agricultural University, Assam (India). Quality control (i.e. adapter trimming and duplicate removal) followed by de novo assembly revealed the tea endophytic metagenome to contain 24,231 contigs (total 7,771,089 base pairs with an average length of 321 bps) while tea rhizospheric soil metagenome contained 261,965 sequences (total 230537174 base pairs, average length 846). The most prominent rhizobacteria belonged to the genus viz., Bacillus (10.34%), Candidatus Koribacter (8.0%), Candidatus Solibacter (6.35%), Burkholderia (5.18%), Acidobacterium (4.08%), Pseudomonas (3.9%), Streptomyces (3.52%), Bradyrhizobium (2.76%) and Enterobacter (2.56%); while the endosphere was dominated by bacterial genus viz., Serratia (42.3%), Methylobacterium (7.6%), Yersinia (5.4%), Burkholderia (2.2%) etc. The presence of few agronomically important bacterial genuses such as Bradyrhizobium (1.18%), Rhizobium (0.8%), Sinorhizobium (0.34%), Azorhizobium and Flavobacterium (0.17% each) were also detected in the endosphere. KEGG pathway mapping highlighted the presence of microbial metabolite pathway genes related to tyrosine metabolism, tryptophan metabolism, glyoxylate and dicarboxylate metabolism and amino sugar metabolism which play important roles in endophytic activities including survival, growth promotion and host adaptation.

Assam is known worldwide for its production of tea; the state contributes around 52 percent to the India’s tea production.Similar to tea, crude oil operations date back to the 19th century and accounts for about 15 percent of India’s crude output, thus making these sectors important economically. However apart from the positive effects, crude oil operations result in gas flaring, which is already recognized as an environmental problem. Taking into context the harmful effects of gas flaring the present investigation aims to study the impact of gas flaring on physiological parameters of tea plant with respect to growth adjacent to oil field in Merbil Majuli OCS 6(WEST) in Dibrugarh district of Assam during 2019-2020. The study was designed with Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) accommodating five levels under distance and two levels under seasons. Plant samples were collected at random intervals and estimated for plant physiological parameters such as water saturation deficit(WSD),relative turgidity, stomatal count, polyphenol content, specific leaf weight, caffeine content, chlorophyll content, plucking point density. The present study found that gas flaring had a significant effect on the physiology of the tea crop in terms of growth. The study found a gradual decrease in relative turgidity, specific leaf weight, plucking point density, stomatal count, leaf area measurement, polyphenol content, chlorophyll content, caffeine content, but an increase in water saturation deficit of green tea leaves on plants growing closer to the flare pit.