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| Dignitaries at the meeting in Silchar on Saturday. A Telegraph picture |
Silchar, Feb 8 : The Indian Tea Association is set to launch an aggressive promotional campaign, to be named Brand India, in close association with the Indian Tea Board for its products in Assam and Cachar tea plantations.
Addressing the 108th annual general meeting of the Surma Valley branch of the ITA in Silchar today, its secretary general, M. Das Gupta said the campaign would be aimed at replicating the tea board’s efforts in this direction.
The campaign will be conducted in league with leading brand strategists of tea marketing such as Hindustan Unilever and Tata Tetley.
Das Gupta hoped that the campaign would help to increase domestic consumption of tea produced by Indian companies.
He said the growth rate of consumption of tea in the country per annum was 3.3 per cent, much lower than that in Pakistan and the UK. The country’s per head consumption of tea is still pegged at 730gm per annum, he added.
He, however, expressed satisfaction at the improvement of the price realisation of the tea products of both Assam and Cachar — the CTC and Orthodox brands — last year which is estimated at Rs 80 per kg for Cachar CTC, a hike of Rs 21 compared to 2007.
He said the price realisation in Assam Tea was in general still lower if viewed from a global perspective.
Das Gupta stressed the need for a severe regimen of the price control. He said this could be achieved if the social costs incurred by the tea plantations in both the Brahmaputra and Cachar valleys were proportionately shared by the Centre, the state government and the tea industry in the ratio of 40:10:50
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