Jorhat, Nov. 8: The Tea Board has assured small tea growers of looking into their grievances regarding discrepancy of prices paid to them for green leaf and taking steps to redress the same within a week.

The assurance came in the wake of Dibrugarh district’s small tea growers boycotting the factories and not selling tea leaves for the past week, and sporadic protests which culminated in a mass protest yesterday in three districts of Dibrugarh, Tinsukia and Sivasagar. The protest was called off after the Tea Board said it would take steps to ensure that factories had just paid the benchmark price fixed by it for the month of October.

Assistant deputy commissioner Jogesh Baruah was also present in the meeting held in the Tea Board office at Dibrugarh last evening. He said a decision was taken to ask all factories to submit documents pertaining to how much they had bought from which seller and at what price in October and then compare these with the receipts given to the small tea growers.

“If a discrepancy is found, then the factory will be asked to pay the difference through a notice,” Baruah said.

This exercise would be done within a week’s time.

The price for a kg of green leaf had been fixed at Rs 17.44 for October. Slogan-shouting growers said they would boycott the factories that did not pay the difference. The growers, especially in Dibrugarh and Tinsukia districts, alleged that they were being paid between Rs 10 to Rs 16 but not the price fixed by the Tea Board.

The small tea growers demanded that the Tea Board take steps to regulate the price and find a mechanism so that the factories do not take advantage when there is a surplus. Although there are a large number of small tea growers in Jorhat and Golaghat districts, there have been no protests there till now.

The president of the Jorhat District Small Tea Growers’ Association, Durlabh Bora, said because of five days’ holidays in the beginning of October, tea leaves could not be gathered. Hence, there was a glut in the second week with so much leaf being plucked that the prices automatically fell and it became a buyers’ market. “We have not faced this much of a problem in Jorhat because we are more aware and plucked only quality leaves. In some areas, where leaves were thrown away or prices had fallen to Rs 5 or Rs 6, was most likely due to huge quantity and poor quality of leaf,” he alleged.