Who sets the rules
The Tea Board of India is the body that governs the trade.
It sits under the Ministry of Commerce rather than Agriculture.
That placement tells you something about what it exists to do.
The board licenses producers, registers exporters and runs auctions.
It also promotes Indian tea abroad, which is a second hat entirely.
Those two roles sit awkwardly together, and always have.
India produces roughly 1.3 million tonnes of tea a year.
It is one of the largest producers and the largest consumer.
Most of what it grows is drunk inside the country.
That is unusual, and it shapes how the trade is run.
The board sets grading terminology and export documentation.
Food safety, by contrast, sits with FSSAI.
The split is clean on paper and messier in practice.
A consignment needs both sets of paperwork before it moves.
Know which body issued which document before assuming anything.
The board also runs promotional campaigns in export markets.
Those campaigns sit alongside the regulatory work, which makes for odd bedfellows.
The grading language
Indian tea is graded by leaf size and by how whole the leaf is.
The language is a string of initials rather than numbers.
Whole leaf grades sit at the top, and dust sits at the bottom.
SFTGFOP is the longest of the common strings.
It means special, fine, tippy, golden, flowery, orange pekoe.
Each word adds a claim about the leaf, and none is tightly regulated.
Orange pekoe refers to leaf size, not to flavour or to origin.
Broken grades brew faster, and they are what most teabags contain.
They are not inferior, and they suit a different purpose.
Darjeeling is graded differently again, and by harvest rather than size.
First flush is the spring picking, light and astringent.
Second flush follows, and it is where the muscatel note appears.
Autumnal pickings are fuller and less prized.
Grading tells you what is in the chest, and very little else.
Two chests carrying the same grade can taste nothing alike.
The vocabulary comes from the auction rooms rather than a laboratory.
It was built to describe lots quickly, and it does that well.
Geographical indications
India protects regional tea names through geographical indications.
Darjeeling was the first, and it remains the most fiercely defended.
The name is tied to a defined area and to a defined set of gardens.
The board issues a logo, and licensed gardens have to use it.
Darjeeling produces under 10,000 tonnes in a year.
Far more tea is sold under the name than the region can grow.
That gap is the whole reason the protection exists.
Assam and Nilgiri hold their own GI registrations.
Each covers a region, a set of gardens and a method.
Registration does not grade the tea inside the region.
A weak Darjeeling is still a Darjeeling, legally and commercially.
The GI mark is a claim about origin and nothing beyond it.
Look for the logo and the licence number rather than the word.
A packet carrying the name and no logo is the common trick.
Blends are legal, and they are required to say so on the packet.
Enforcement is uneven, and it depends on where the packet is sold.
Outside India the logo is often the only thing anyone checks.
Altitude, and what certification misses
Altitude explains more of the cup than any grading term does.
Assam sits low, around 50 to 150 metres, and the leaf grows fast.
The leaf is large, and the liquor is malty and strong.
Darjeeling gardens run from 600 to 2,000 metres.
Growth is slow at that height, and the flavour concentrates.
Nilgiri sits high too, around 1,000 to 2,500 metres.
It gives a fragrant, brisk cup that takes milk well.
The three regions are not competing versions of one tea.
They are different crops grown in different climates.
Certification covers the paperwork rather than the cup.
A GI mark says where it grew, and a grade says how it was sorted.
Neither of them says whether it was made well.
Buy from a shipper who names the estate and the invoice number.
Auction catalogues are public, and they are worth learning to read.
Taste is still the only test that settles the question.
Shippers who publish invoice numbers are easier to hold to account.
The ones who do not are usually selling something they cannot trace.