The Hindu : Business : Rs. 100 crore sought for tea research

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 26, 2006
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Rs. 100 crore sought for tea research

Special Correspondent

GUWAHATI: The Tea Research Association (TRA) has urged the Union Commerce Ministry to set aside a corpus of at least Rs. 100 crore for research activities on tea, which, the association said, was essential to ensure production of quality tea.

TRA Chairman Sudhir Prakash told reporters here on Wednesday that the money spent for tea research in India — Rs. 10 crore a year against an annual turnover of Rs. 1,000 crore for the industry — was very insignificant.

Besides, the flow of funds allocated by the Government for tea research in the form of grants to the Tocklai Experimental Station of the TRA was "irregular,'' he said.

He said the mandate for Tocklai since 1990 had been on increasing the quantity of tea produced.

However, both the Government and the industry had now given the TRA a fresh mandate to concentrate on the quality of tea.

Following the new mandate, the TRA had decided to organise a two-day engineering and manufacturing symposium on November 10 and 11 to be held at Tocklai, M. Hazarika, Director, Tocklai Experimental Station, said.

The TRA chairman said that if India had to compete with other countries it must compete on the basis of quality. Mr. Prakash said in the past three decades India's preference was CTC tea as 70 per cent of around 900 million kg produced was consumed in the domestic market, while hardly 200 million kg was exported.

One of the reasons for India not focusing on orthodox tea was that the cuppage of orthodox tea was only 250 cups against 500 cups a kg in the case of CTC tea.

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