India's tea production may touch the one billion kg mark this year with the meteorological department predicting a normal monsoon, a highly-placed Tea Board of India official said here today.
"With the prediction of a normal monsoon, the production of tea during the year is likely to be in the region 990 million to one billion kg," Tea Board Chairman Basudeb Banerjee said.
Banerjee, however, said that it was difficult to predict the actual output since different regions of India receives varied degree of rainfall.
"As IMD predicts normal monsoon, the production is likely to be normal this year. However, you can't really predict since the distribution of rainfall is generally not even in India," he said.
India Meteorological Department (IMD), in its first official forecast for the 2010 June-September rains, had in April said that monsoon this year would be 98 per cent of the long period average.
The tea output of the country stood at 979 million kg in 2009 against 981 million kg in the previous year.
Banerjee said that the exports of tea may go up in the range between 5 per cent and 10 per cent during the current fiscal though the official target was fixed at 200 million kg, same as the quantity of shipments in 2009-10. India had exported 190 million kg of tea in 2008-09.
India exports CTC (crush-tear-curl) variety of tea mainly to Egypt, Pakistan and the UK and the premium orthodox variety of tea to Iraq, Iran and Russia.
India faces competition from Kenya and other African countries for exporting CTC tea, while for orthodox variety competition comes up from Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
Banerjee said that the Board was trying to popularise tea in the domestic market highlighting the health benefits of it. India's per capita consumption of tea is 800 gm, which is even lower than Pakistan's average of one kg.
