Tea Board to start tea auction in November

Kolkata, May 20 (UNI) Tea Board will start e-auction in November this year, which will eventually replace the physical auctions to ensure better price discovery.

Speaking to UNI here today, Tea Board Chairman Basudeb Banerjee said,''We have appointed NSE.IT, the firm which was engaged to prepare IT backbone in National Stock Exchange, on a turnkey basis for offering consulting services and development and maintenance of a stable e-auction platform across the six major centres of Kolkata, Guwahati, Siliguri, Cochin, Coimbatore and Coonoor. About Rs eight crore would be invested in the project.

E-auction first started at Coonoor, based on the system developed by Accenture and IBM. There were some problems when the system started and the Coonoor auction started.

Currently, it is only Tamil Nadu, where e-auction system works, and it is managed by the respective government.

''I will start a dialogue with all the stake-holders after the appointment of the consultant and they will finalise a new business model after taking into account the lacunae in the present system,'' he said. The hardware backbone has already been prepared by Accenture-IBM.

Since the hardware consisting of V-Sat antennae, servers and PCs are already inplace, development of customised software, testing the same and stabilising should not take some more months, he said.

The impact on prices, after this e-auction starts, would be distortion-free and the play of market forces would lead to price discovery, which is truly reflective of the demand-supply scenario.

UNI