Once among Darjeeling’s thriving estates, the 155-year-old Selim Hill plantation has been grappling with the same problems chipping away at yields for years: intensive cultivation, erratic rainfall, rising temperatures and deteriorating soil health. Now, the estate has become the unlikely centrepiece of an experiment that begins not with tea leaves, but with finely crushed volcanic rock.
The Darjeeling Revival Project, led by climate-tech startup Alt Carbon — founded by brothers Shrey and Sparsh Agarwal — is betting that spreading basalt rock dust across tea fields can do two things at once: permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while restoring the health of soils that have sustained Darjeeling’s famous tea for over a century.
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