Just days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged scientists to spend time with students, it has come to light that Tocklai Tea Research Institute, the premier research and development (R&D) centre for the Indian tea industry, is unable to pay salaries and retiral dues to its scientists due to lack of funds provided by the commerce ministry.
Tocklai, set up in 1911, is the world’s oldest tea R&D institute, which seems to have fallen on hard times. Joydeep Phukan, secretary, Tea Research Association (TRA), which manages the institute, confirmed to FE, “We have not been able to pay the retiral dues of gratuity and leave encashment to scientists and employees who have retired. Over and above this, we have not been able to pay the statutory dues due to the extreme fund shortage.”
He added that meeting salary expenses is also a big problem as TRA has not been receiving the funds from Tea Board of India.
TRA gets a portion of its funds from the subscription paid to it by tea companies. The commerce ministry fulfills the balance with the Tea Board disbursing this fund in the form of grant-in-aid. The Tea Board is supposed to pay 49% of the total expenditure towards salaries, PF, gratuity, medical and training, which works out to about `9-10 crore annually, but only `3.5 crore has been released annually for the past two years. Arrears towards such payments have accumulated to about Rs 11 crore.
Phukan added, “Not receiving funds for recurring expenses like salary aggravates the problem. The members from the tea industry have increased their subscription by 100% over three years and TRA is also trying to generate its own income. While increasing self generation of income to replace the government funding will take some time, in order to retain good scientific talent, we need to implement the 7th Pay Commission scales, which will further put the burden on us.”
Santosh Sarangi, joint secretary (plantations), commerce ministry, said Tocklai’s establishment costs have been going up and the Centre has not been able to commercialise the research for generation of additional revenue. However, Prabhat Bezboruah, chairman, Tea Board of India, told FE disbursement of government funding has declined by 80%. He said, “This is a prime example of ham-handed budget cuts. I don’t think that our expenses have gone up much over the last three-four years despite the increase in pay scales, because we have less employees today as compared to three-four years back.”
Data also shows that from a negligible amount, TRA is now meeting 14% of its budget from internal resource generation from lab tests and sale of items. Phukan said, “We plan to enhance bio formulation sale in a big way in the coming months at Tocklai.”
Just last year, a team of five scientists from the department of mycology and micro-biology of the pioneering institute developed three varieties of tea wine — CTC wine, Orthodox wine and green tea wine. The process for commercialisation is in the pipeline as there are several steps to go before commercial sale.
The total tea produced in India for 2017 was 127.88 crore kg. The budget for R&D for this period has not been allocated yet. In contrast, Sri Lanka produced 33.8 crore kg and the Tea Research Institute of Sri Lanka was allocated approximately `15 crore towards R&D, entirely provided by the government. Kenya produced 44.5 crore kg and a similar amount was allocated to Tea Research Foundation Kenya for R&D by its government. While China produced 240 crore kg, the figures are not available for R&D but all expenses are borne by the government every year.