Vision, Mission and Objectives

To provide support services that increase the productivity and the leaf quality of the tea lands of Sri Lanka's tea smallholders.

The mission is deliberately narrow. The Authority is not a buyer, a factory or a bank. What it can change is the state of the land, the skill of the person working it and the strength of the organisation that person belongs to — and the mission names those, rather than the outcomes in the market that follow from them.

The Tea Small Holdings Development Law sets the Authority's objects. In the working form used across its divisions, they are:

• Increase production. Raise the volume of green leaf produced by the smallholding sector, principally by replacing old and low-yielding tea with recommended cultivars under the replanting programme, and by bringing suitable new land under tea where expansion is appropriate.
• Improve productivity. Raise yield per hectare and quality per kilogram through extension advice on pruning, plucking rounds, shade, nutrition, and pest and disease management, and through soil conservation on the sloping land most smallholdings sit on.
• Develop marketing. Strengthen the smallholder's position in the chain between the bush and the factory — through societies, through group input purchase and value addition, and through clearer, fairer assessment of leaf at collection.
• Advance smallholder welfare. Support the welfare, savings and enterprise programmes that make a smallholding household more resilient than the crop alone allows.
• Organise the sector. Register smallholdings and societies, keep those registers current, and use them as the basis on which every other service is delivered.

Each objective is carried by a division with named functional areas, set out under Divisions and Functional Areas, and delivered in the field through the regional office network and the Tea Inspector ranges beneath it.

The Authority's approach rests on three practical commitments. The first is that assistance follows verified work: subsidy instalments are released against field inspection, not against paperwork. The second is that the smallholder should not have to know the Authority's organisation chart to get help — the Tea Inspector for the range is the single point of contact, and this website's Staff Directory exists to make that officer findable by district and subject rather than by title. The third is that the registers are the foundation: an entitlement, an allocation and a society membership are all read from the register, so keeping it accurate is not administrative housekeeping but the precondition of everything else.

Progress against these objectives is published in the Statistics section and in the Authority's annual reports, which are available under Downloads.