The Confederation of Indian Small Tea Growers’ Association (CISTA) has urged Finance Minister P. Chidambaram to allocate special funds in the Union Budget for 2013-14 to the newly-constituted Small Tea Growers’ Directorate under the Tea Board to enable it to function smoothly.
In a pre-Budget memorandum, CISTA has pointed out that the directorate has been specially constituted to ensure better execution and monitoring of various tea production promotion schemes and to help initiate a pilot programme on alternative market development for small tea growers in addition to providing systematic training and extension services. All these objectives, if achieved, would in turn help small tea growers produce better quality green tea leaves and ultimately upgrade themselves from mere green leaf producers to made tea producers.
However, no effort to achieve these objectives could hope to succeed in the absence of adequate fund availability. In this connection, the memorandum draws attention to the success of the Tea Small Holding Development Authority in Sri Lanka and the Kenya Tea Development Authority.
The memorandum also emphasises the need for introducing plantation credit cards for small tea growers who do not have access to institutional finance, particularly bank loans. At present small tea growers are required to raise their own resources outside the banking system and therefore at a cost. This is proving too much for them, more so because the majority of them are poor, uneducated people from backward and minority communities, having virtually nothing to fall back upon. When small coffee growers in Karnataka are entitled to kisan credit cards, there is no reason why a similar card should not be made available to small tea growers also, the memorandum observes.
The other demands include extension of the present crop insurance scheme to cover small tea growers through Agriculture Insurance Company of India Ltd and making available fertilisers at subsidised rates in view of the recent jump in the prices of urea and potash.
Copies of the memorandum have also been sent to Commerce Minister Anand Sharma, Minister of State for Commerce D. Purandeswari and Chairman of Tea Board M. G. V. K. Bhanu.