The Hindu : Business : Tea industry: XI Plan outlay cut to Rs. 800 crore

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Saturday, Nov 17, 2007
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Tea industry: XI Plan outlay cut to Rs. 800 crore

Indrani Dutta

Allocation to
HRD suffers
the sharpest cut
Workers training unit planned
in Jorhat

— FILE PHOTO

A tea garden in North Bengal

KOLKATA: The outlay for the tea industry during the XI Plan has been pared to Rs. 800 crore from the proposed Rs 1,000 crore.

This was decided earlier this week at a meeting of the apex committee which comprises officials of the Union Finance and the Commerce Ministries besides Planning Commission.

However, even after the 20 per cent cut, the current outlay will be substantially higher than the Rs. 350 crore allocation made for the sector during the X Plan.

The industry’s regulatory body, the Tea Board of India, which implements the schemes, may now have to re-work almost all of them.

One of the sectors which suffered the sharpest cut is the one of allocation on human resource development (HRD), which has been halved from the proposed Rs. 50 crore. Rs. 6 crore was allotted under this head in the previous Plan.

There was also a proposal to set up another Indian Institute of Plantation Management to take care of the training needs of the workers and the managers.

While the present one is at Bangalore, another institute was proposed at Jorhat in Assam.

Sources said that the other areas where allocations have been pruned include plantation development (Rs. 350 crore against Rs. 400 crore), R&D (Rs. 95 crore against Rs. 130 crore) and market promotion (Rs. 100 crore against Rs. 130 crore).

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