Come April, 41 development officers (DOs), all agriculture graduates, and 22 factory advisory officers (FAOs), all graduate engineers, will fan out into the country’s tea-growing districts where small tea growers are concentrated. The Tea Board is putting in place the proper manpower structure required to tackle the myriad problems facing the small growers.

There are about two lakh small tea growers in the country and more than 600 bought leaf factories. The tasks of the DOs and FAOs will be not only to teach the growers how to produce better quality crops and how to form self-help groups but also, through proper coordination with bought leaf factories, advise them on how to get a fair price for their produce. On average, each DO would have to handle about 5,000 growers and each FAO 25 to 30 factories.

These DOs and FAOs would be part of the 100-strong team being built by the Tea Board for its small tea growers’ directorate to be located at Dibrugarh, Assam. The directorate would also have 18 assistant directors, five deputy directors, four joint directors and one director, in addition to a few accountants and other staff.

The small growers produce nearly 300 million kg annually or roughly 30 per cent of the country’s total production. But most of them suffer from problems such as uneconomic holding size, primitive cultivation practices and the not-so-satisfactory quality of their produce. As a cumulative effect of all this, the yield is low and the price of produce unremunerative. Through the small tea growers’ directorate, which is still to start functioning, the Tea Board aims to address these issues.

The marketing of tea produced by small growers particularly poses a problem. The growers sell green leaves to bought leaf factories which, in turn, process the leaves and sell the made tea in the market. In other words, the growers do not get to know the price at which the made tea is sold. They would, therefore, often complain of unremunerative prices for their crops. The indifferent quality of crops cannot attract high prices, retort the factory owners.

The Tea Board, with the help of the respective State Governments, is also trying to set up district-level monitoring committees in tea-growing States to monitor production, movement, processing of green leaves produced by small growers and marketing of made tea by bought leaf factories. Such committees, already functioning in Assam and West Bengal, it is claimed, have helped arrest the decline in the price of tea produced by small growers.

Meanwhile, a section of small growers in Tamil Nadu have gone to court demanding not only the scrapping of the price-sharing formula worked out by the Tea Board originally in 2004 and subsequently finetuned in 2008, but also the introduction of minimum support price on the lines for similar schemes already in force for jute and sugar.

The court, it is learnt, has not agreed to the demand for minimum support price but has urged the Tea Board to work out a “scientific pricing formula with a human approach after taking into account the social-economic conditions”. Accordingly, the Tea Board has asked the Institute of Costs and Works Accountants of India to study the cost structure of small gardens in the State and is weighing the option of involving an institute such as the Madras Institute of Economics to study other aspects.

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