The Hindu : Business : NSE outfit to help roll out e-auction in tea

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Thursday, Dec 06, 2007
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NSE outfit to help roll out e-auction in tea

Special Correspondent

New system will be in place by June

NSE IT will own it for three years
Self-funding model for sustenance

KOLKATA: The Tea Board has signed an agreement with NSE-IT for putting up an e-auction platform for tea, which will also be owned by the NSE subsidiary for three years. Efforts are now on to roll out this new system by June 2008.

The agreement signed here on Monday, envisages a Rs. 9 core project which involves NSE-IT writing the software for this project much of which will use the existing hardware. The Tea Board Chairman, Basudeb Banerjee, said some of the hardware would be upgraded.

After three years, the industry would takeover the platform and the NSE project also entailed developing a self-funding business model for sustaining e-auction. The e-auction system now being run in the South will co-exist with this.

The consultation, now going on with the stakeholders, is expected to be over by mid-December, after which the entire project will be discussed with the 25-member committee, headed by the Tea Board Chairman, which has been set up for this purpose. V. Rajaraman, Vice-President, NSE IT, said the software would be developed thereafter and the scheme was proposed to be rolled out by June after providing the requisite training facilities.

Technology is expected to be harnessed in a big way for this rollout including the use of radio frequencies for reading bar code for counting tea lots. The issue of settlement is also expected to be addressed in a better way, while transaction costs should come down for the seller under the new system.

There are, at present, nine tea auction centres of which five are in the north and the rest in the south. Of this, the oldest one is located here, where auctions started in 1861. Apart from the auction teas are sold privately. India is the world’s largest black tea producer with an average annual output of 900 million kg.

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