The Jalpaiguri tea auction centre. Picture by Biplab Basak

Siliguri, June 18: The three-year-old North Bengal Tea Auction Centre in Jalpaiguri is closing down because very little tea is coming through its doors even though the district’s annual production is more than 150 million kg.

“The centre has always struggled with low inflow of tea. On the last three auction dates, including today, no tea reached the centre. We have no other option but to close it down,” said the executive officer of the centre, Kamal Bhattacharya.

The centre, inaugurated in February 2005, had to face stiff competition from the decade-old Siliguri Tea Auction Centre, which auctions 85 million kg of tea a year.

“Despite a complete waiver of the central sales tax (CST) at the centre, sellers continued to route almost their entire production to Siliguri,” said N.K. Basu, the secretary of the committee that runs the NBTAC. “It became worse when the Bengal government declared a partial waiver on CST for the Siliguri centre as well, which left a margin of one per cent only.”

The data available with the NBTAC shows the diminishing trend of sale at the Jalpaiguri centre.

In 2005, 7.90 lakh kg of tea was auctioned at the centre, before the figure came down to 3.62 lakh kg and 1.62 lakh kg in the next two years. “In the current year, we were supposed to hold sales on 24 dates, but so far only 10 sales could be conducted because of acute shortage of tea in the inventory,” the executive officer said.

“Only 6,000 kg of tea has been auctioned in 2008,” Bhattacharya added.

The centre has 58 sellers, 158 buyers and seven brokers registered with it.

“The problem was never with the buyers, but with the sellers. Most of them hardly ever sent a large volume of tea here for auction. Prices were never the reason; they were competitive compared to Siliguri. In some cases, the prices here were higher than in the Siliguri Auction Centre,” said Basu.

The buyers appeared to be a frustrated lot.

“How can an auction centre collapse because of poor inflow of tea in a district that boasts of more than 170 tea estates producing over 150 million kg of tea in a year is beyond me,” said Jyoti Prakash Mitra, a buyer who had earlier been registered with the centre.

The planters had their argument.

“Because of the absence of the requisite number of buyers and brokers, sellers in the Dooars never felt confident of sending their tea to the Jalpaiguri auction centre,” said Prabir Bhattacharya, the secretary of the Dooars Branch of the Indian Tea Association.