Coimbatore, June 1 (PTI): The United Planters' Association of Southern India (UPASI) has urged the Tea Board and National Tea Research Foundation (NTRF) to make available tea quality monitoring instrument "E-nose" to the industry at the earliest.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) has demonstrated a working model at the 5th workshop of NTRF held at Kolkatta on May 26, which seemed to have potential to improve the qualities of Indian tea significantly, UPASI President J K Thomas said in statement here.

The Electronic Nose is a smart instrument that is designed to detect and discriminate among complex odours using an array of sensors consisting of a number of broadly tuned (non-specific) sensors that are treated with a variety of odour sensitive biological or chemical materials, he said.

The system is capable of sensing volatile compounds of tea and reliably predicting tea taster like scores with a high degree of accuracy, he said.

Neural Network based 'soft computing techniques' are used to tune near accurate co-relation smell print of multi-sensor array with that of the Tea Tasters' scores, Thomas said.

This, however, seems to have put tea tasters on the defensive, much like the way farm workers felt at the time the tractor was introduced and bank employees resisted the introduction of computers, Thomas observed.

+Time will surely prove that this instrument will be as useful to the tea taster as it is to the planter,+ he said.

This has a very significant impact on the ability of tea factory management to monitor quality objectively while the tea was in the process of being manufactured, he said.

Presently, the quality of the tea was determined after it was manufactured.