The Tea Board is going to initiate a two-step process ensuring that imported teas meet national food safety standards, ramping up its effort to protect the domestic industry and consumers from lower quality products and meeting a long-standing demand of local producers.

The Board’s effort is aimed at allowing only compliant teas to come to India, its chairman C. Murugan told this newspaper, to ensure quality in the domestic market as well as re-export.

“We want to restrict the import of low-quality teas to India. It is hurting the domestic industry and consumers. And when such teas are being re-exported as Indian tea instead of multi-origin, India’s brand name is being impacted,” Murugan told The Telegraph.

As part of the two-step process, importers have to apply through the Tea Council portal ‘well in advance’ for a certificate to import teas. After reaching the port of entry, Tea Board officials will draw random samples from the import consignments and send them to NABL-accredited labs to test on the parameters laid down by the food safety regulator FSSAI.

Meanwhile, the teas will have to be stored in designated warehouses till the test results are available. Once all the boxes are ticked, a clearance certificate will be issued to the importers and the teas will be allowed to leave the warehouse for end use.

“We are creating the infrastructure towards this. It will take 15 to 20 days. Thereafter, legal opinion would be obtained, followed by approval of the ministry (commerce)”, Murugan said to the members of Tea Association of India (TAI) at the association’s 50th annual general meeting in Calcutta on Saturday.

The power vested with the Board under the Tea Act and the Tea Control Marketing Order will allow it to operationalise the process. The organisation has identified some of the major ports where imports are taking place at scale. While Panitanki near Siliguri at the Indo-Nepal border accounts for the lion’s share of Nepal imports, Tuticorin and Cochin ports are being used for Kenyan tea imports.

India imposes a 100 per cent duty on tea imports even as Nepal, the biggest exporter to the Indian market, gets duty-free access via the Indo-Nepal Treaty on trade. Duty-free import is also allowed if it is meant for re-export. However, a section of the industry has flagged that teas meant for re-export find their way to the domestic market, circumventing duty, taking advantage of the lack of monitoring.

Nepal teas, which share characteristics with Darjeeling teas because of close geographical proximity, have often been blamed for the dwindling fortunes of gardens on Bengal’s hills. They are often passed off to unsuspecting customers as the Darjeeling variety, even as the latter is protected by a geographic indication (GI) tag — a mark of exclusivity.

The proposal of the Tea Board for enhanced monitoring appears to be following the playbook of Sri Lanka, where tea imports pass through strict compliance checks before hitting the market.

In November, this newspaper had reported that more than half of imported Nepal tea failed food safety standards, prompting the industry to demand stricter monitoring.