The Guwahati Tea Auction Centre (GTAC), one of the world’s largest by volume traded, completed 50 years on Friday amid restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic that robbed it of its golden sheen.
Buyers and sellers, adhering to social distancing norms, marked the day digitally with a low-key programme. Pithily, it encapsulated GTAC’s journey from the “outcry” system to e-auctioning that helped Assam’s tea industry absorb the initial blows of the pandemic.
Assam’s tea used to be traded via the auction centre at Kolkata, the world’s second after London’s, prior to the establishment of GTAC on September 25, 1970. But planters in Assam sought an auctioning system closer home after the country’s independence.
GTAC sold 9.1 million kg of tea at an average price of ₹5.68 per kg in 1970 with tea trader Zafar Ali buying the first lot of 1,317 kg of broken orange pekoe from…