Four tea-producer bodies from Assam and West Bengal have written to the Prime Minister asking him to scrap the rule that makes them sell half of what they grow through public auction.

The four are the Assam Bought Leaf Tea Manufacturers Association, the North Eastern Tea Association, the Bharatiya Cha Parishad and the North Bengal Tea Producers' Welfare Association. Together they say they account for about 60 percent of north India's tea, roughly 1,120 million kilograms of the region's 1,350 million. That is a lot of leaf asking to leave the auction floor.

The rule they want gone dates to 2015, when the Ministry of Commerce and Industry told every registered manufacturer to route at least half its yearly production through a public tea auction. The producers argue the requirement puts them at a plain disadvantage: selling at auction costs more and takes longer than a sale straight from the factory gate, they said, and it sits awkwardly beside the government's own ease-of-business talk. They also called it an infringement of the freedom to trade, and noted that the Tea Board's own expert committees have never recommended forcing tea through the auction.

Set against that is what the auction is for. The public sale is the one place a chest of Assam is weighed, tasted and priced in front of every buyer at once, with the number written down for all to see. That openness is not a courtesy. It is how a small garden or a bought-leaf factory learns what its tea is actually worth, rather than taking whatever a single private buyer offers across a table. Strip half the crop out of the room and the prices that remain speak for less of the trade. One of the four petitioners is itself a bought-leaf body, the very sort of maker the open floor was meant to protect.

For now the rule stands, and the Guwahati auction will keep doing what it has done since 1970: call the lots, take the bids, and post the price. Whether Delhi loosens the requirement is Delhi's to decide. By weight and measure, the case for the auction was always the same one this Authority makes for the cup. Keep it in the open, and keep it honest.

Sources: The Assam Tribune, Assam, West Bengal tea bodies oppose mandatory auctions, writes to PM; ANI, Assam, Bengal tea producers urge PM Modi to withdraw notification mandating 50% sale through auctions.