Govt notifies a half-full Coffee Board
The Centre has created history of a dubious kind by notifying a 14-member Coffee Board as opposed to the usual 32. Industry sources state that this is perhaps the first time that the 64-year-old board has been partially constituted.
By Raghu Krishnan, TNN |
BANGALORE: The Centre has created history of a dubious kind by notifying a 14-member Coffee Board as opposed to the usual 32. Industry sources state that this is perhaps the first time that the 64-year-old board has been partially constituted.
Intense lobbying for the 23 non-MP, non-official slots is said to have delayed notification to an extent where the draft accounts for ‘05-06 could not be placed before the new board, the old one having ended its term on April 22. The saving grace is that the Coffee Act allows the Coffee Board chairman, appointed for five years, to approve draft accounts in the absence of a board and forward them to the Auditor-General of India.
Only 7 of the 23 non-official slots have been filled. The lobbying has been so intense for the 10 grower-member slots that only five vacancies have been filled. For the first time, the three slots for large growers with holdings of more than 10 hectares has not seen any representation from Tamil Nadu.
All the three large grower-members — former Upasi president Anil Kumar Bhandari, A S Shankare Gowda and DK Udayshankar — hail from Karnataka which grows some two-thirds of the country’s coffee. Only two of the seven slots for small growers have been filled, again both from Karnataka — DB Subbe Gowda and PB Chandrashekhar.
It is expected that the remaining five small grower slots will see some representation from Kerala, which has 75,718 small grower holdings, as opposed to 53,985 for Karnataka and 14,079 for TN. A Congress worker is still trying for membership as a grower, with recommendations from 10 MPs.
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Lobbying may also have delayed the nomination of two of the three members to represent coffee trade interests. For the first time, the commerce ministry has demonstrated out-of-the-box thinking by nominating as coffee-trade member Harish Bijoor, a full-time consultant with a proven expertise in retailing and who has spent the first 16 years of his career working for majors like HLL and Tata Coffee. It is expected that an exporter and a domestic dealer/roaster will fill up the other two coffee-trade member slots.
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