WEST BENGAL: TEA BOARD GAMES

Mamata complains the BJP is maliciously moving the Tea Board out of Kolkata. Not quite, it turns out

Chief Minister Mamata Baner jee is again on course for a dust- up with the Centre, this time over the post of Tea Board chairman going to a political app ointee. The post has so far been held by an IAS officer.

While on a visit to Mumbai on Nov ember 1, to promo te Bengal as an investment destination, she made trusted lieutenant and PWD minister Aroop Biswas issue a statement. It alleged that the Centre was shifting the Tea Board from Kolkata to Guwahati— capital of BJP- ruled Assam— in yet another discriminatory move against Bengal.

However, the news— that the Tea Board, stationed in Kolkata for the last six decades, was being shifted— was apparently not true. “There was no talk of shifting. The new chairman was just stressing the need for making the industry self- reliant, less dependent on the board,” says Kaushik Basu of the Darjeeling Tea Association.

Mamata has been fuming ever since tea planter Prabhat Kamal Bezbaruah from Guwahati was made chairman of the board in May, part of the Centre’s decision to have political appointees at the head of the tea, coffee and spice boards.

As part of the new commerce ministry policies and amendment to the Tea Act, it was decided that the board chairman would be a political appointee ( functioning in a nonexecutive capacity) while the post of deputy chairman would have all the executive powers vested in him/ her. Naturally, the post of deputy chairman is open to civil servants.

Before the amendment to the Tea Act, the post of chairman lay vacant