The purpose of this study was to investigate the diversity of cultivable nitrogen fixing, phosphate solubilising and total bacteria originated from 580 rhizospheric acidic soils samples of tea plants grown at 62 locations. Based on FAME profiles of over 1428 rhizoplane bacteria, 63 bacterial genera were identified with a similarity index > 0.3, but 56.4% of the identified isolates belonged to six genera: Bacillus (37.02%), Pseudomonas (12.67%), Stenotrophomonas (5.71%), Paenibacillus (6.58%), Arthrobacter (4.35%) and Brevibacillus (3.98%