Budget 2015: Tea plantation sector urges for support in pre-budget appeal

SILIGURI: Tea Plantations, though always suffer from natural calamities or remain highly dependent on weather conditions, are not covered by agricultural insurance facilities. The planters want Government to bring them under the immunity umbrella of Agriculture Crop Insurance schemes.

Agriculture Insurance Co. of India Ltd. (AICIL) has been introduced to protect agriculture farmers against heavy rain, hailstorm, pests or other natural calamities. Though plantation items like rubber or coffee are covered under the schemes, tea is yet to join the league.

“We have requested the Union Finance Minister to consider this in next budget proposal,” said Bijoy Gopal Chakrovborty, President, Confederation of Indian Small Tea Growers’ Association (CISTA), an umbrella of 2 lakh Indian small tea growers those who contribute around 35% to the total national green leaf yield. “Not only STG’s, the inclusion will be highly beneficial for all planters,” said a senior Indian Tea Association member.

As learnt, AICIL started working on designing schemes for tea plantations too. “We have taken joint steps and asked meteorology department for long duration weather data for every tea producing region,” said, ITB Director (Development) G. Boriah earlier. But, no final outcome has come up so far.

Tea Plantation sector has also urged for re-introduction of new Price Stabilization Fund(PSF) Scheme as the previously launched one has expired in 2013. It was first launched by GoI in April 2003 for a tenure of 10 years to provide financial relief to the growers when prices of commodities like Tea, Coffee, Rubber and Tobacco fall below a specified level. Around 13 lakh small farmers were targeted to be covered with the support of a corpus of Rs 500 crores.

In addition to these, STGs have urged for exemption on excise duty of tea machinery and import duty on farm equipments. STGs, mostly without own factories, always remain dependent on third party owned factories to process their green leaf production. And STGs complain of low price offered by BLFs and BLFs complain of low quality of leaf almost always keep the relationship between the two sectors under stress. As a new trend, STGs are now forming cooperative societies to develop own factories under the support of ITB. “The exemption will help us a lot in this initiative,” said Chakroborty.