TEA BOARD: LEARN FROM SIKKIM

Kolkata: Tea Board of India has asked north-eastern states to focus more on orthodox specialty tea aimed solely at the international markets instead of CTC that they are mostly producing at present.

Tea Board has asked the states to follow the Sikkim model while maintaining quality close to that of the Darjeeling crop.

Assam and neighboring states account for more than 70% of the country’s total tea production.

“For the other north-eastern states [states other than Assam] they should look at it as high grown orthodox specialty tea. Even that is exported in bulk it will fetch higher returns. We don’t want them to produce CTC only,” Tea Board chairman Basudeb Banerjee said.

According to him, although CTC tea is sold easily the price realization is less.

“Many of them are producing orthodox tea but not to the extent we want them to,” he said. According to Banerjee, the north-eastern gardens should follow the Darjeeling model. “Which is what Sikkim has done in a Temi tea estate. We are telling the same thing to Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand,” he added.

The Tea Board is in touch with the state governments for field visits.

It will go to Mizoram next month while a team has already visited Nagaland.

“We are also encouraging big players to enter those states. It cannot happen on a backyard kind of attempt. If Indian companies can go abroad and start production from there the same model can be replicated here too,” Banerjee said at a north-eastern summit in Kolkata.

Tea Board will provide 50% subsidy to small growers in those regions apart from a corpus for setting up a self-help group.

He also said that the Guwahati auction centre has started operating entirely through e-auction model and that the Kolkata auction centre will run entirely on that model from April this year.