KOLKATA, June 21 (PTI): The Tea Board has initiated a study to determine the price sharing formula in the plantation districts of the country for which it has engaged a consultant, an official of the state agency said.
The study will be conducted in all the tea-growing districts of the country except the Gudalur-Pandalur region of Tamil Nadu and the Wayanad district in Kerala. According to the official, Tea Board has given a timeline of six months to the consultant to finish the study.
The consultant, BDO India LLP, will carry out field visits to gather data relevant to the study from farmers (small tea growers) and factories-bought leaf factories (BLFs).
The team of the consultant firm will physically visit the states of Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Tripura where the concentration of STGs is high. For other tea-growing states like Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Odisha, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim, the study will be carried out virtually, the official said.
Secretary-General of Indian Tea Association Arijit Raha said that the proposed price-sharing formula will determine the price that the BLFs will pay for buying green leaf from the small tea growers. “This will help the STGs in getting fair and remunerative prices for green leaf”, he said. This method of price determination for green leaf produced by the STGs already exists in Sri Lanka, he added.
In Sri Lanka, nearly 77 per cent of total tea production is by the STGs, while in India it is about 55 per cent.
President of Confederation of Indian Small Tea Growers Associations (CISTA) Bijoy Gopal Chakraborty said that the move to conduct the study “is a welcome move and we had been demanding this for long.”
