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The Tea Board plans to stop direct lending and day-to-day monitoring of the Special Purpose Tea Fund (SPTF) from April, 2012.
“We want to change the way we operate the SPTF in the 12th Plan period. We are planning that the lending should be done by banks instead of directly by us,” a top Tea Board official, who declined to be named, told PTI.
“We will act as either a refinancing agency or provide an alternative mechanism by which we can move out of ‘day-to-day management’ of loans. We might restrict ourselves to providing subsidy,” the source added. However, the final contours for scheme are yet to be shaped.
The development comes at a time when the government has hinted that it is uncomfortable with management of the fund by the Tea Board. A separate department under the Tea Board currently makes loans and manages the STPF like an NBFC.
SPTF is a special corpus of the Union Ministry of Commerce for replanting tea bushes that are more than 50 years old across the country. The cumulative value of loans from the fund are estimated at Rs 4,761 crore over 15 years.
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