The global opportunity to optimize Indian tea exports

The Tea Planet’s CEO Srinivas Ganadinni in speaking out on the forthcoming annual Indian central government budget, says the industry is looking forward to the proposed Tea Promotion and Development Act of 2022 in the coming year. He says the Tea Act of 1953 has lost relevance in today’s global context. He feels that the union budget should introduce new objectives so that the tea board can act as a facilitator for optimizing the development, promotion, and research in the tea industry. Other commentators have also said that this budget should have a vision that speaks about the next five to ten years, particularly in the context of potential exports.

According to Ganadinni, “Indian tea has a large demand in export markets, but we are still ranked fourth in the [global tea] industry. Hopefully, this budget will make it easier to promote Indian teas on the global market through international trade shows by providing trade fair subsidiary schemes to large, medium, and small scale industries that are currently exporting. This will invariably help build a resilient ecosystem for these sectors that will bolster our overall growth. Additionally, industries that are into the second line of packaging and contributing to value addition to the tea industry should be encouraged and subsidies should be given to enable infrastructure upgrades that will encourage exports to world markets.

“For F&B and restaurant business, GST input should be revived which will help the industry to move at a faster pace,” adds Ganadinni. He suggests that the government should think of some insurance mechanisms or business interruption insurance policies as there are in other countries. “The reason being the risk of business today is completely different compared to a decade ago due to increased disruption in the industry affected by factors like pandemic and cyber thefts.”

Ganadinni is the founder of The Tea Planet, a franchise chain that sells various blends of tea found globally by sourcing the finest ingredients from all over the world. He has the experience and vision for the tea industry which sees that this is one of the potential goldmines of the Indian food, processing and packaging, and marketing economy. It requires an all-sided approach in which the obstacles are removed to innovate and entice tea drinkers worldwide with better branding, marketing and packaging, and business structures which he speaks about as the current realities that need to be confronted by the Indian tea industry.