Renowned tea producing corporate group Goodricke has decided to purchase tea leaves from thousands of small tea farmers in North Bangal’s gardens. This move by the group is likely to be a boon for small tea growers who do not have the tea manufacturing facilities and hence remain vulnerable to big manufacturing barons.
The Kolkata-based Goodricke group has 30 tea gardens — eight in Darjeeling, 10 in Assam and 12 in the Dooars — and produces the famous brands like Goodricke CTC-Leaf and Dust, Goodricke Premium CTC leaf and instant tea. According to chairman of the of the United Forum of Small Tea Growers’ Associations Partha Pratim Pal, a senior functionary of Goodricke had “visited the growers with the proposition to buy the leaves” some weeks ago.
Pal added that Goodricke’s representative apprised them of their “interest in purchasing leaves from small growers and their plan to bolster the facilities and capacities in some of their existing gardens to produce CTC (curl, tear, crush) tea from the leaves”. “We appreciate their gesture of collaboration and have expressed our readiness to work with them,” stated Pal, saying that most of their tea leaves were bought up by well-established tea estates, “but their attitude has been to take us for a ride whenever there is a good tea harvest exposing us to low prices. However, for the first time a prominent a company like Goodricke has come to us with a substantial and viable plan to buy our produces on reciprocally beneficial terms on a regular basis”.
Even Bijoygopal Chakraborty, vice-chairman of the forum, claimed that Goodricke has assured the small tea growers of the best possible prices and “would also provide them requisite technical know-how and guidelines for the use of fertilisers and other ancillary information to boost quality”. Chakraborty added that their forum planned “to tag the company with growers’ self-help groups from where they can get substantial quantity of leaves every day”.
The forum’s vice-chairman revealed that some 1,000 individual growers “have been clubbed into nine self-help groups” which would supply some 40,000 to 50,000 kg of leaves to Goodricke everyday and the estimated yearly turnover could be approximately 7 to 8 million kg. Chakraborty also said the Goodricke had also planned to set up a new factory at Danguajhar Tea Garden in the vicinity of Jalpaiguri town to process the produces from small growers.
Meanwhile, the leaves would be used at the company’s factories in 12 gardens located in Jalpaiguri district. Rajen Pradhan, a local tea veteran, claimed that such policy of the Goodricke would certainly help “the mushrooming small individual tea growers as they won’t have to depend on the mercy of the tea estates which are prone to exploit them”.