Digitally, TEA : Procurement via QR Code & Mobile APP

Tea Board of India has initiated the process of issuance of Identity card with QR code to the small tea growers of Assam and the first batch of cards was distributed on 20-01-2018 at Bongaigaon District in presence of the Executive Director, North East and the members of the small tea growers association of Bongaigaon District.

The issue of identification is a long standing demand of small tea growers and the process of reaching out to the small tea growers and providing them with an Identity card with photograph and biometric features stored in a memory chip was started in 2013 by Tea Board. Tea Board has so far collected the records of 88000 small tea growers from Assam alone and more than 1 Lakh for the entire North East and provided nearly 75000 ID cards to the small tea growers. The thought process for continuous improvement in the system was on and search for new technological innovation for streamlining the leaf collection and sale with the help of the ID card issued to the small tea growers was initiated and finally it was decided in 2017 to replace the existing ID card with bio-metric features by Quick Response Code (QR Code).

The ID card with QR code presently issued to the small growers shall be used for buying and selling of green leaf from small tea growers by use of a mobile App. By using this App, small tea growers can record the quality and quantity of leaf for sale to the factories along with the date and time of sale. The price has been kept optional and the buyer of the green leaf i.e. Bought Leaf Factories will be able to buy the leaf from Small Tea Growers’ by use of the same app.

In the process, the QR code in the ID card of individual growers shall be used to capture the growers’ details with unique ID number. The data so generated shall be used to analyse the leaf details, quantity of leaf received by each factory with date and time of receipt, quality of leaf supplied by the Small tea growers etc. The analysis of back end data shall be used to determine the training requirement of a particular place, plucking round, PPC compliance and requirement of a new factory etc. Moreover, the traceability of source of green leaf shall be easier as the App will have a feature for the factories to record the trough number and the growers’ details whose green leaf is stored in the particular trough. This innovation shall bring in transparency to the entire system of sale of green leaf with mapping of growers supplying green leaf to individual factories and implementation of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) to individual growers account.