Fully electronic tea auction centres soon

Kolkata, May 21 : In order to bring about total transperancy in the complicated system, the Centre has decided to introduce Electronic Auctioning in all its six auction centres in the country by this year, Union Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh announced here today.

Speaking to newsmen at the end of his two-day meeting with those associated with the tea industry and the concerned trade union leaders, Mr Ramesh said the government had decided to opt for total electronic auctioning keeping in view the complications and large scale corruption in the auctioning at present.

He said besides introducing the system in all the six Auction centres through a state-of-the-art computer software technology, developed by the IT wing of the National Stock Exchange, they were planning to launch a similar system in two more tea auctions centres, which were coming up in Jorhat and Dibrugarh in Assam before this year end.

With the development of the new software by the NSE, Mr Ramesh said, they planned to introduce the new system in the Kolkata, Guwahati, Siliguri, Connoor, Coimbatore and Kochi Auction centres within the next few months at a total cost of over Rs 15 crores.

He said, earlier, IBM and Accenture were given the responsibility of developing the necessary software for the purpose but they failed to do their job and put the Tea Board in great difficulty by recommending a wrong and defective software.

Later, the government switched on to NSE, which in turn developed a suitable software for the purpose.

About the system of electronic auctioning, Mr Ramesh said following its formal opening in mid June in Kolkata centre the entire good and medium quality of tea would be auctioned electronically.

However, at present only about 50 per cent of auctioning were done through computers leaving a lot of scope for corruption, the minister felt.

He also announced that to start with as many as 200 laptops would be provided to the tea brokers and the participants to carrying on auctioning.

UNI