Tata Tea office

There has been a disturbing news doing the rounds in the past few days that Amalgamated Plantations Private Ltd (APPL) – the "emergent entity from disinvestment of the plantation business of Tata Tea in East/North India", as the company describes it – is winding up its offices in Assam and has asked its officers to shift to Kolkata. This piece of news has evoked strong reactions across Assam, and various organisations including the All Assam Students' Union (AASU), Assam Tea Tribes Students' Association (ATTSA) and even the outlawed ULFA(I) faction headed by Paresh Barua have raised protest and asked the Company not to shift business from Assam. Rameswar Teli, Union Minister of State for Food Processing Industries, has directly appealed to Ratan Tata to revoke the reported decision of the Company. What is however very surprising is that the top management of Amalgamated Plantations Private Ltd (APPL) has remained totally silent on the issue and has even maintained a stoic silence as to whether the news about the decision is actually true or false. Union Minister Rameswar Teli has pointed out that while Amalgamated Plantations Private Ltd (APPL) has 21 gardens in Assam employing around 30,000 workers, the Government of Assam has extended lots of facilities to the said Company, including paying Rs 1 crore to each garden for welfare of the workers. Teli has also pointed out that the tea labourers working in the 21 APPL gardens are all stakeholders of the Company, as they have invested Rs 8,000 each in the Company. He has also alleged that APPL had lured the tea workers to invest their hard-earned money in the Company during its reorganization, but after incurring losses, the Company had stopped giving dividend funds to the workers. If this is true then it is a serious matter which calls for an immediate intervention of the Central government, and more particularly of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, because he had begun his career as a tea vendor and that the tea labourers of Assam have overwhelmingly supported Modi's party in the past few elections in Assam. It is pertinent at this point to look at the journey of APPL. While the origin of the Company dates back to the beginning of the tea story in Assam in the early 19th century when James Finlay, one of the several pioneer European tea planters played a dominant role in shaping the tea industry of Assam. A century later, in 1976 to be precise, the Tatas made their entry into tea by joining a partnership with James Finlay to form Tata Finlay. A few years after that, finlay disinvested its share and the company came to be known as Tata Tea Ltd. While Tata Tea Ltd, alongside Hindustan Lever Ltd and Williamson & Magor Ltd became the top three players, a few years ago it withdrew direct participation in tea growing and manufacturing and created Amalgamated Plantations Private Ltd (APPL). The business of APPL however is being carried out by the demerged estate business of Tata Global Beverages. The Tata Group on the other hand, controls the majority 65 per cent of Amalgamated Plantations Private Limited on an aggregate basis. It is interesting to note the Vision statement of APPL, which reads as "To be the most trusted provider of differentiated agricultural product supply solutions." On the other hand, its Mission statement includes (i) Building enduring partnerships with customers and suppliers, (ii) Driving agricultural productivity with North East India and plantations at the core, (iii) Improving the quality of life in the communities where we operate, and (iv) Creating value for all stakeholders, and (v) Being an organization which fosters innovation and empowerment. Incidentally, there are at least two prominent Assamese persons in the executive management of APPL, one of whom used to be also the Investment Advisor to former Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi till 2016. It is definitely the duty of the Company in general and the two Assamese members of the executive management of APPL to come out with a statement on the exact scenario before the situation flares up. Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal too should have intervened at the earliest, so that the situation does not go out of control and militant factions take advantage of it. Militant groups including ULFA have already done a lot of damage to investors in Assam from the mid-1980s onwards till a few years ago.