When COVID-19 brought India to a standstill in 2020, award-winning journalist Manno Wangnao found herself stranded in her hometown of Tizit, a remote subdivision in eastern Nagaland’s Mon district. Instead of waiting for life to resume, she began asking the same question that had troubled her since childhood: Why were people in one of Nagaland’s oldest tea-growing regions still poor?
The answer, she would discover, lay not in the tea bushes carpeting the hillsides, but in an invisible web of information gaps, exploitative middlemen, and bureaucratic exclusion that had quietly trapped generations of tea growers in debt. Over the next few years, Wangnao helped hundreds of farmers navigate the Tea Board of India’s registration process, facilitated agricultural machinery, helped open the region’s first direct factory accounts for local tea growers with the support of Tea Board officials, and connected growers to government schemes they had never known existed.
Her efforts helped shift bargaining power towards farmers who had spent decades accepting whatever price was offered for their tea leaves. Tea was never an unusual sight in Tizit. Cultivation began in the region in the early 1990s, when a handful of families, including Wangnao’s, started planting tea after learning from neighbouring Assam. Over time, tea gardens spread across villages in eastern Nagaland. Nearly every family cultivated a small plot.
Yet prosperity never followed. Growing up as the daughter of a two-term legislator, Wangnao watched villagers arrive at her home almost daily seeking financial help — for hospital bills, school fees, funerals, weddings, or simply food. As a child, she struggled to reconcile the reality around her.
