GIS Anchored Integrated Plantation Management : Tea

GIS Anchored Integrated Plantation Management : Tea

Alokesh Ghosh
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing
Kolkata Centre
Plot – E2/1, Block – GP
Sector – V, Salt Lake
Kolkata – 700 091
Ph: (033) 2357 9846,5989,3580
Fax: (033) 2357 5141
E-mail: alokesh.ghosh@erdcical.org

Introduction
Tea is one of the most important and highest foreign exchange earning agricultural product of India. The Indian states of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, North Bengal (Darjeeling) and Sikkim contribute significantly to the overall tea production in the country. Tea is also grown in Southern part of the country such as Tamilnadu, Karnataka and Kerala. Total Tea cultivation area is approximately 0.45 million ha. There are three major varieties of tea produced world wide such as Orthodox, CTC & Green Tea. India mainly produces Black Tea whereas Green Tea is very popular in Japan, Taiwan, China etc. India produces 850 million Kgs of Tea annually, which is 30% of world production (Annual world production 2800 million Kgs.). For last couple of years, due to rapid changes in global economic scenario, globalization of Indian economy, breaking of USSR and increasing presence of countries like Kenya, Indonesia, SriLanka etc. in global export market, Indian tea industry is under recession. Consequently average price realized per Kg. of Tea by Indian Industries decreasing steadily as described in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 : Statistics of indian tea production and prices

Industry and Government has realized that there is immediate need to modernize the tea production process to make it globally competitive. The major national objective of tea industry is to utilize available lands on estates towards sustainable development by ensuring land use efficiency with proper soil conservation measures and environment protection. In addition, producers’ objective is to manage tea estates to maximize profits. Therefore, the overall objective of this proposed project is to identify suitable strategic land use development plan and to introduce precision farming with efficient planning & monitoring of plantation to maximize profitability. The strength of IT in the form of GIS & ERP solution is expected to give excellent result towards achieving this goal.

Page 1 of 4
| Next |