Oil, gas & the tea economy

Long before semiconductors, the North-East was an industrial pioneer. Oil was struck at Digboi in Upper Assam in the 1880s, and the Digboi refinery, commissioned in 1901, is the oldest operating refinery in Asia — the birthplace of India's petroleum industry. Today Oil India Limited (headquartered at Duliajan) and ONGC work the region's fields, feeding refineries at Guwahati, Numaligarh, Bongaigaon and Digboi, while Tripura's Palatana plant turns natural gas into power exported across the region and to Bangladesh.

The other historic engine is tea. Assam grows more than half of all the tea produced in India, across hundreds of estates concentrated around Dibrugarh, Jorhat and the Brahmaputra valley, and the distinctive malty Assam brew is exported worldwide. The GI-tagged industry supports millions of livelihoods and has spawned a growing tea-tourism economy of heritage bungalow stays.

These legacy industries remain the backbone of the regional economy and are now being modernised and greened — Numaligarh's bamboo bio-refinery, tea-tourism diversification, and gas-based power all point to the next chapter for industries that have defined Assam for well over a century.