Siliguri, May 12: The flavour will come packed with the history of the product.

If the proposal of a Netherlands-based NGO is accepted, consumers of Indian brew across the world will be able to identify its origin from a code stamped on the cover of the packages containing the tea.

The aim, officials of Solidaridad, the NGO, said, is to help tea producers and consumers by inducting them into a mechanism known as UTZ certification, conferred by the UTZ Foundation, another Netherlands based-organisation. The Foundation is famous for running one of the largest coffee certification programmes of the world, which has been recently extended to tea.

“Under the mechanism, a tea garden or seller, exporting from India, would be granted an unique code number which would be printed on the packets, bags or cartons sent outside the country by the company,” Satadru Chatterjee, director of Southeast Asia for Solidaridad, said today. “Any consumer can access the Foundation’s website to crack the code that will give the history of the tea.”

Solidaridad will hold a two-day workshop in Darjeeling from tomorrow to discuss threadbare the proposal among the stakeholders of the industry.

The garden or tea exporter enrolling itself with the Foundation will be considered an UTZ certified tea producer or seller. “The Foundation running the certification programme has independent experts too, who would monitor producers and upload relevant details of the company,” Chatterjee said.

The information to be available to customers would include the nature of fertilisers used, quality of training imparted to workers, emergency services available to them and whether they are covered by the ILO conventions, to name only a few. “There are also some environment criteria — for example minimal use of water and energy — that producers have to meet to obtain and continue with the UTZ certification,” the official said.

“Getting enrolled with the UTZ would open up a global market for producers. Purchasers, aware of the benchmarks that were met, would opt for buying tea from them,” Chatterjee said.

So far, the system has been introduced in Kenya and would be shortly introduced in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. “We plan to introduce it in India soon and have called stakeholders and representatives of government departments concerned to explain to them the mechanism for their feedback,” he said. “It can be introduced by the government or the exporters can approach the Foundation privately.”

More than 40 experts from India, the Netherlands, China, Sri Lanka and Indonesia will participate in the workshop.

“It is much like the Geographic Indicator but more specific,” said Bijoygopal Chakraborty, vice-president of the Confederation of Indian Small Tea Growers’ Associations and a participant of the workshop.