The Authority and the sector it serves

The Tea Small Holdings Development Authority was established on 1 February 1977 under the Tea Small Holdings Development Law No. 35 of 1975. It is the sole statutory body mandated for the development of the tea smallholding sector in Sri Lanka, and it reports to the Ministry responsible for the plantation industries.

A tea smallholding is, in law, land under tea not exceeding ten acres — about 4.05 hectares — in the possession of one person. That definition covers a very large part of the national crop. Smallholders are not a marginal category in Sri Lankan tea; they are the majority of it, and the productivity of their land, the quality of the leaf they pluck and the price they are paid together determine a great deal of what the country earns from tea and what rural households in the tea-growing districts live on.

The Authority exists because that sector cannot be developed by market forces alone. A smallholder replanting a block takes land out of production for several years before the new tea yields; without assistance, the rational decision for an individual household is to keep plucking a declining bush. The subsidy schemes, the extension service and the society structure the Authority operates all address that gap between what is sensible for one household this season and what the sector needs over a generation.

The Authority's work falls into four broad areas.

Land development. Replanting, new planting, infilling and soil conservation are supported by subsidy schemes administered through the regional office network. Assistance is paid in instalments against field inspection at each stage, so that public money follows work actually done on the ground rather than an application on paper.

Extension and technical advice. The Authority maintains a field extension service reaching every tea-growing district. At the grassroots the unit of service is the Tea Inspector or Extension Officer range; 147 such ranges operate across the tea-growing area, supervised by 26 sub offices grouped into eight regions. An officer in a range is the smallholder's first and usually only point of contact with the Authority, and much of what this website does is make that officer easier to find and easier to reach.

Societies and marketing. Tea Smallholder Development Societies organise smallholders at village level. They receive input allocations on behalf of members, run welfare and savings programmes, and give a group of households a standing that no individual smallholder has when dealing with collectors and factories. The Authority registers, supports and monitors them, and runs enterprise and welfare programmes with them under the Tea Shakthi banner.

Training. The Hantana National Training Centre near Kandy is the Authority's residential training facility, running programmes for smallholders, society office bearers and the Authority's own field staff.

The legislation that created the Authority was passed in 1975, at a point when the difference in yield and quality between the estate sector and the smallholding sector had become a national policy question rather than an agricultural one. The Authority began work in February 1977 with a mandate that has not fundamentally changed since: increase production, improve productivity, develop marketing, and work for the welfare of the tea smallholder.

What has changed is scale and method. The extension network has been built out district by district; the subsidy schemes have been revised as costs and cultivars have changed; the society structure has grown from a handful of pilot bodies into a national network; and the Hantana centre has taken on training that was once done, if at all, in the field. The Authority now employs roughly 440 staff across a head office at Battaramulla, nine regional offices, the sub offices beneath them and the national training centre.

The Authority's regional offices are at Galle, Matara, Ratnapura, Kegalle, Kalutara, Kandy, Nuwara Eliya and Bandarawela, with the head office at Pelawatte, Battaramulla. A full list, with addresses, telephone numbers and map locations, is in the Staff Directory, and the divisions and their functional areas are set out under Divisions.