foreign interests in land and financing. In what would become one of the largest holdings in Nilgiri tea, Robert Stanes founded the United Nilgiri Tea Estates Company in 1922 from the Allada Valley estate, with the Chamraj and Rockland estates added in 1923, Devabetta in 1926, and Kodery in 1928. Following Indian independence in 1947, the British began to sell their interests in tea gardens to Indian owners and the 1953 Tea Act put the tea industry under the regulatory jurisdiction of the Tea Board of India. While a tea auction was established in Coonoor in 1963, the Soviet bloc countries became the primary customers of tea from the region, taking about 80% of Nilgiri tea from the 1970s to 1990s. To accommodate Soviet preferences for mass-produced lower-cost teas, processing methods shifted to production of Crush, Tear, Curl and instant tea. More processing factories were built and cooperative agreements, such as Indcoserve, were made to accommodate small holders. There was an increase in production during the 1970s as the Sirima–Shastri Pact brought in many repatriated Indian Tamils of Sri Lanka to the region and the Tamil Nadu Tea Plantation Corporation was established as a government-operated tea garden to provide for their transition. Of the small farm growers, the majority belong to the Badagas community. A crop diversification program initiated in the 1980s by the UPASI and the Tea Board saw many small holders move into the tea industry, resulting in nearly doubling the amount of land under tea cultivation by 2000. As the economies of the Soviet countries began to waver later in the 1980s, the Nilgiri Planters' Association led efforts to encourage estates and small growers to reform cultivation and processing practices to accommodate the preferences of the Western market. They tested new clonal varieties, moved to produce orthodox-rolled teas and white teas, began marketing single-origin estate teas, and encouraged maintaining certification of social and environmental practices. The Tea Board of India created a trademark for use on tea that is produced solely in Nilgiri and attained geographical indication status in 2008. Geography, cultivation and processing While Camellia sinensis is cultivated in areas across the southern tip of India in the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, Nilgiri tea, and is defined as that which is cultivated and processed in District of Nilgiris, constitutes about half this area's total production. The Nilgiri Mountains form the border between the