Tea Board’s Nov price 84% more than last year’s

The Tea Board has fixed ₹23.92 a kg as the average price for the green leaf for November in The Nilgiris district.

Factories buying green leaf from small growers (popularly called bought leaf factories) which they use as raw material for processing into manufactured tea have to pay the minimum amount this month.

Tea Board’s Executive Director, M Balaji, said that all bought leaf tea factories have been instructed to pay this price and all factory officers must ensure that no factory in their jurisdiction paid the fixed price this month.

He said that this price has been fixed based on the consolidated average sale price fetched by the relevant teas in the auctions last month. This price is less than the price fixed for October by ₹6.11 and for September by ₹3.14.

Nevertheless, it is far higher than the price of ₹13 fixed for November, 2019. That means, compared to last year, growers will get a whopping ₹10.92 per kg or 84 per cent more.

Considering that 4 kg of tea are bought by factories to produce 1 kg of manufactured tea, for every kg of manufactured tea, the growers will now get about ₹44 more than what they got this time last year.

“While this is welcome, the availability of green leaf will depend on the favourable rains brought by the North-East monsoon. We also need intermittent sunshine,” Ramesh Chander, President of The Nilgiris Small Tea Growers’ Association, told BusinessLine.