J. Thomas expects to auction over 200 mn kg tea this year

December 16th, 2011 - 9:38 pm ICT by IANS  

Kolkata, Dec 16 (IANS) J. Thomas & Company, the world’s oldest tea auctioneer, expects to auction over 200 million kg of tea in this financial year, a top executive of the company said Friday.

“In the last fiscal, we had auctioned 180 million kg and we hope to cross 200 million kg in the current fiscal. Around 500 million kg of tea are generally sold through auction centres and this fiscal, an additional 10 million kg may come for auctioning,” J. Thomas & Company Pvt Ltd chairman and managing director Ashok Batra told media persons on the occasion of the 150-year celebrations of the auctioneer.

Auctioning of tea was put on the electronic platform in 2009. CTC tea was the first to go for the e-auction route followed by orthodox tea in July, 2011. Only the Darjeeling variety of tea still undergoes the manual auctioning mode.

Batra said India was the first country in the world to introduce e-auctions of tea.

Consultative Committee of Plantation Associations chairman C.S. Bedi said e-auction mechanism for the orthodox tea needed some tweaking.

“The e-auction mechanism for CTC tea is perfect, but the same for orthodox tea needs a bit of tweaking. The commerce ministry has asked us to form a task force for this,” Bedi added.

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