Tea Board of India launched a Mobile App to monitor Tea Industry

The Tea Board is planning to capture details of small farmers and estates supplying green tea leaf to a factory via a mobile application. This is a digital marketing initiative of Tea Board of India in order to streamline the tea business in India. The App is developed basically to take care of the needs of the small tea growers and more specifically the very small and marginal farmers.

It is being considered as a step to implement advanced traceability in the Tea industry.

The Tea Board of India will soon launch ‘Christened Chai Sahayak’ – the tea assistant mobile application. It has been developed by Sumato Global Tech, an IT company based in Guwahati. The information about the quality and supply of leaf, QR code of grower will be scanned. The authority will be able to monitor the price at which the leaf is sold to the factory. The application which is at present available in Assamese and English, is further to be made available in other regional languages like Bengali, Tamil and Hindi for all stakeholders in the country. For maximum benefit, the application will have a separate section for tea growers, factories and the field officers of Tea Board. The app will ensure traceability by registering batches of daily manufacturing of tea. Since the QR codes of growers play an important role for traceability, the application will store these codes for the reference of factories as well.

The guidelines of Food Safety and Standards Authority of India for the tea industry will also be notified over the application. Information on the region-wise weather and soil will be forecasted for the cultivators. Also, the factory announced daily price along with the minimum benchmark for green leaf will be notified on the application. The application will also be used to broadcast the workshops and training programs for the cultivators and factory workers. It will be a platform for the FSSAI to ensure that the regulations and standards are implemented at the primary level of production as well. The app is also expected to come with an interface to interact with the experts of Tea Board. The tea cultivators and factories will be able to raise their queries and concern to the officials with supporting images and documents. The officials will provide the required solution via the application itself.

For cultivators and factories, the application will also provide a platform to sell and buy the Green tea leaf. The process will be simple and just require scanning the QR code of farmer. The app can automatically update the available information about the grower along with the date and time of sale/purchase done. This will allow the Tea Board to trace information such as the amount of leaf sold/bought, its quality and the cost paid thereof. The factories will also be able to put their comments on the quality of leaf received by them. Even the State Bank of India is ready to integrate the banking facilities if the small tea growers appeal for it. This app launch event is attended by the tea growers, companies dealing with tea.

 

Reference –

1.The Tea Board of India website: http://www.teaboard.gov.in/ (Accessed on: 20.02.2019)