Development of a productivity measurement model for tea industry

India is the largest tea producing country in the world and tea contributes 1% of the GDP of the country, apart from providing a direct livelihood to a large number of workers. However, in the recent past the productivity performance of Indian tea industry has not been very satisfactory. India’s predominance in the tea production is on decline and this has already started showing its bad effect on all the stakeholders. The tea industry in India must search for a comprehensive productivity improvement strategy to overcome the challenge of high competition from other emerging tea producing countries like Srilanka, Kenya, China, Bangladesh and Indonesia in the global level. As a pre-requisite, the quest for a productivity improvement programme follows productivity measurement. But, meticulous literature survey reveals that no study has been undertaken so far on the productivity measurement of a tea industry. Also, the productivity measurement methods presented in the literature are usually too intricate and difficult to apply. The competency and expertise needed for their implementation is scarce in context of Indian tea industry. With this backdrop this paper attempts to propose a relatively simple productivity measurement model suited to tea industry. For this, productivity accounting model is used and suitably given the form so as to fit to a tea industry. A case study, conducted in a tea industry in Assam, India, to analyze the performance of the model is presented. The study reveals that the model is comprehensive and satisfies the six criteria of measurement theory such as validity, comparability, completeness, timeliness, inclusiveness and cost-effectiveness. Further, the study reveals that the proposed model identifies the areas of poor resource utilization responsible for measured total productivity decline in the tea industry. These resources are labour, material and energy and a number of suggestions have been put forward as a mitigating measure.