Seven out
of ten people in the north-east of India make a
living from farming. They grow food to feed their
families and to sell for cash.
The most important
crop grown for money is tea. This region of India
produces more tea than any other. The hills of the
north-east are perfect for growing tea. In fact,
tea used to grow here in the wild! Roll your cursor
over the pictures to find out why:
In Assam state
in the north-east, there are over 800 different
tea
plantations. But picking tea leaves is not as
easy as it looks … the workers must only pick
the top leaves or the plant will stop growing. Tea
pickers get paid for the amount of leaves that they
pick. Some really quick pickers can fill their baskets
with 15 kilos of leaves in one day!
The people
of the north-east grow other crops to sell for cash.
Unscramble the two words below to find out two other
important cash crops in this region:
Teapotso
(one of our favourite foods in the UK … mashed,
fried or baked!)
Grace Sun
(something very sweet)
Although there
is a little industry in the region, there are some
sawmills and plywood factories. They use timber
from the large forests that grow on the hills. Other
people cut down the trees for firewood, and it is
usually the women who have to carry the wood home.
Imagine carrying piles of wood up these steep mountain
slopes every day!
But cutting
down the forests can start a sequence of events
that cause problems for both the people who live
in the hills, and the people who live on the lowlands
below.
Local
people are trying to improve the situation. After
all, if they continue to lose soil, they will struggle
to grow any crops in the future. Planting more trees
certainly helps, and people have built terraces
like big steps in the mountains. These terraces
flatten out the steep slopes so that the rain does
not wash away the soil so easily.
Local
people are trying to improve the situation. After
all, if they continue to lose soil, they will struggle
to grow any crops in the future. Planting more trees
certainly helps, and people have built terraces
like big steps in the mountains. These terraces
flatten out the steep slopes so that the rain does
not wash away the soil so easily.
