In a move to boost tea transportation via containerized rail services, the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) convened a meeting with key stakeholders from the tea industry. The meeting, held at NFR’s Zonal Headquarters in Maligaon, gathered major participants such as logistics operators, tea associations, exporters, and producers.
Assam, a significant tea producer contributing around 55% of India’s tea output, employs over 10 lakh workers in the organized sector across approximately 850 large estates. The state annually produces nearly 160 million kilograms of export-oriented tea. NFR’s Chief Public Relations Officer, Kapinjal Kishore Sharma, highlighted the initiative’s objective to facilitate increased movement of tea consignments through rail-based containerized services. These services offer benefits like cost-effectiveness, reliability, faster transit, reduced handling losses, and environmentally sustainable transportation.
During the meeting, senior railway officials, tea industry representatives, logistics operators, and other stakeholders discussed measures to enhance rail connectivity, operational coordination, and container handling facilities for tea transport. The focus was on strategies to attract higher volumes of tea traffic to railways by ensuring efficient, seamless, and customer-friendly logistics services.
NFR has shown commendable performance in freight operations, achieving a total freight loading of 11.4 million tonnes in the financial year 2025-26, marking a 6% growth over the previous year. Freight handling operations also improved significantly, with unloading increasing by 688 rakes. To further bolster freight logistics infrastructure, NFR is actively developing and operationalizing modern freight terminals and multimodal cargo handling facilities in the region.
