National Turmeric Board (2025): Institutionalising India’s Dominance In The Global Spice Trade

Policy Update
Sandra Menon

Introduction

India produces and exports turmeric in larger quantities than any other nation; but it took several decades for this spice to have its own organization. This happened when the Ministry of Commerce & Industry set up the National Turmeric Board (NTB) on October 4, 2023, thus carving out an exclusive body to look after its cultivation, research, standards, and export from the ambit of the Spices Board’s broad agenda.

This new body was launched officially in New Delhi on 14 January 2025 through the inauguration by the Union Minister Piyush Goyal and appointing Shri Palle Ganga Reddy, the son of a farmer in Nizamabad, as the Board’s first Chairman. The establishment of its office took place on 29 June 2025 in Nizamabad, Telangana, through the inauguration of Union Home Minister Amit Shah and allocation of Rs 200 crore to enhance quality of crops, research, and farmers’ welfare.

The fundamental idea behind this Board is fairly straightforward, regardless of the politics surrounding it. India already generates more than 70 per cent of the world’s turmeric and possesses more than 62 per cent of the total global market for the spice, and yet the farmer community of India, especially those operating from Nizamabad, has been complaining for years that their monopoly in turmeric has rarely resulted in assured income because the spice was only one among 52 spices that had to be considered by the Spices Board.

The NTB is supposed to make up for this lack of focus by concentrating solely on turmeric, coordinating research, ensuring the enforcement of quality standards, developing export infrastructure, and interfacing with the 20 states cultivating this particular crop. As of mid-2026, the Board has recently celebrated its first year of existence, and yet, despite the claims of Piyush Goyal regarding the “significant strides made,” it is, quite literally speaking, an infant organization.

Background

The need for a turmeric board was not something that came about suddenly; rather, it has taken nearly four decades of agitations by farmers, mostly centered around Nizamabad, a district that has always claimed to be the country’s turmeric capital. The farmers have at times blocked highways, sat in protest outside the houses of their very own MPs and, in a case that stands out especially, nominated themselves as candidates in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in order to put the issue into the spotlight.

Political campaigning quickly began to incorporate this demand. BJP candidates contesting from Nizamabad had promised a dedicated turmeric board as early as 2019, and when this promise failed to materialize year after year, farmers raised the issue with their MPs publicly, once even dumping their unsold stock outside their MP’s house.

The official stance of the government for a long time was that such a board was not essential at all. This is evident from what the Minister of State for Agriculture told the Lok Sabha in quite straightforward language in March 2019, saying that establishing a board for a specific spice is not really necessary since setting up an upgraded unit of the existing Spices Board in Nizamabad would suffice. Things changed only after the political importance of turmeric became too obvious to be overlooked.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself announced the establishment of the Board at a public function held in Telangana in 2023, followed by a formal notification by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry just a few months later, on 4 October 2023. Notification No. 2/2/2023-Plant-D made turmeric the sixth commodity to have its very own board set up under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

Despite having such a notification, the establishment of the institution still took more time than the farmers may have wished for. The formal inauguration of the Board took place in New Delhi after fifteen months from October 2023, which was in January 2025, while the establishment of its physical office in Nizamabad happened only in June 2025. This time-lapse should be taken into consideration when evaluating the successes and failures of the Board till now, as an organization existing only on paper for almost a year can hardly produce anything concrete.

Functioning

The NTB is currently operating as an executive entity rather than a statutory one, and this implies that it is constituted through an executive notification from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry as opposed to having an Act of Parliament to back its establishment. The NTB is therefore different from other entities such as the Tea Board and the Coffee Board because the latter two have Acts of Parliament granting them their powers.

This implies that the powers of the NTB, the money, and the sustainability of its existence are subject to executive whims, and several agricultural policy experts have noted this significant structural problem.In terms of its composition, it seeks to include all those government departments whose interests lie in turmeric.

There is a Chairperson appointed by the Central Government and is currently held by Shri Palle Ganga Reddy. Then there is the Secretary who is appointed separately by the Department of Commerce. Under them come the representatives of the Ministry of AYUSH, Department of Pharmaceuticals, Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, and Department of Commerce and Industry. Also included are the representatives of state governments who come on a rotation basis rather than having permanent posts. The first three states whose representatives come on a rotation basis are from Maharashtra, Telangana, and Meghalaya which is well-known for its Lakadong variety that has a very high curcumin content.

Figure 1: Focus Areas of the National Turmeric Board
Source: Vision IAS

Rather than having a single mandate that it tries to fulfill, the functions of the Board are intended to cover almost all aspects of the turmeric value chain, which can be viewed as six interconnected spheres of activity: creation of awareness about the health and medicinal benefits of the crop in the global markets; protection of the rights of farmers who grow turmeric in about 20 states in the country; financing of research and innovation of new products; improving the accessibility of markets and logistics of exports; enforcement of quality standards and food safety; and improvement of productivity to increase incomes of the farmers, not just their yield.

Whether the Board will be able to balance all these spheres and avoid prioritization of some spheres above others may define its efficiency.

Performance

Evaluating the Board’s performance at this point must necessarily be an evaluation based on the figures that it has been handed, not figures created by the Board itself, because the sort of information that would be expected from an institution such as this at this early stage in its existence – new strains actually developed, processing facilities actually constructed, genetically identified quantities actually sold – is simply not available in the public domain. The facts, to the extent that they are known, are summarised in the table below.

Table 1: Turmeric Production and Trade at a Glance

Source: Ministry of Commerce and Industry; PIB press releases on the National Turmeric Board, 2025.

These numbers are important mostly because they provide a benchmark against which future growth can eventually be measured. Government representatives have, at several times, linked the success of the Board to touching USD 1 billion in turmeric exports by 2030, which would amount to about four times the value of exports in 2023-24.

At the time of its one-year anniversary in January 2026, Piyush Goyal stated that the Board had been successful in achieving substantial progress in production of the “golden spice” and creation of new channels for the trading/exporting community, although concrete and measurable data on achievement related to the Board’s activities is still scarce. What is very clear at least at the moment is the political and symbolic significance of the establishment of the Board: the longstanding (almost forty years old) demand of Nizamabad’s turmeric belt has finally received its institutional address, while the government has, consciously or unconsciously, linked its credibility with this billion-dollar target.

Besides the statistics, the Board has maintained a reasonable consistency with regards to its future priorities from press releases and statements by ministers in recent times. Broadly speaking, the priorities can be seen to fall into four main categories. These include increasing the export of over 30 different varieties of turmeric that have already been grown in over 20 states in the country; developing new turmeric products along with skill development among the growers of turmeric; increasing international consumption of turmeric while raising India’s own significant 62 per cent share in world turmeric trade; and improving the logistics to ensure smooth exports of produce from India.

On looking at the four main priorities mentioned above, it becomes apparent that there is a clear effort towards the upgradation of turmeric from its current form to a higher value chain category since there is emphasis on product development, foreign awareness creation, and efficient export logistics, all of which point towards creating value within the country rather than exporting turmeric in its crude form.

Impact

While it may perhaps still be premature to judge the performance of the National Turmeric Board against any empirical data, because much of its agenda, which includes development of new cultivars and development of processing facilities, is a process that would require a few years to yield measurable results, one aspect of its operation that may be fairly analyzed currently is the manner in which it has brought focus on turmeric. By creating the board to manage turmeric production out of the 52-spice mandate of the Spices Board, the government has succeeded in focusing its efforts on this product.

The focus on GI-tagged organic turmeric and the creation of the end to end value chain through packaging, branding, marketing and exports without any middlemen shows that there is an attempt being made to assist the farmers to earn their due share from the value of their produce created overseas instead of missing out to some middlemen somewhere down the line. The Board headquarters at Nizamabad and the districts of Jagtial, Nirmal and Kamareddy, which make up for a significant percentage of turmeric production in Telangana, also act as economic anchors, which will eventually lead to the creation of the research facilities, training centers and export facilities closer to where the produce is actually grown.

More generally, the formation of the Board represents somewhat of a change in the approach to single commodity governance by the Centre. While dedicated boards were traditionally created only for plantation crops like tea, coffee, rubber, and tobacco, turmeric has now earned the same distinction, with its own separate board to govern it.

Emerging Issues

With the Board entering its second year, there are a few structural issues which are becoming increasingly difficult to overlook. Perhaps foremost among these is the non-statutory nature of the board. In contrast to other commodity boards, like Tea, Coffee, Rubber, and Spices Boards, whose powers come from Acts passed by Parliament, the NTB at present enjoys no such statute to delineate its function, powers, and funding; hence, Prof. Narasimha Reddy Donthi has suggested that until a separate Act defines the mandate of the board, there is a risk that the board will remain an announcement rather than a body with teeth to enforce its regulation.

Very much linked to this is the fact that the issue of Minimum Support Price of turmeric, which is a longstanding demand of farmers that predates the creation of the board itself, remains to be addressed even today. The farmers continue to face high seasonality in price, and IMPRI’s independent study of the commodity boards in India also points out that farmers in Telangana have faced loss because of falling prices in the market.

Moreover, the timeline provided by the Board itself has done little to instill confidence. The period between the announcement by the Board in October 2023 and the operationalization of its headquarters in June 2025 was more than twenty months, a period that saw it come under sharp criticism from farmers’ associations, who, in fairness, would have expected some action sooner. Also, the issue of overlapping functions needs to be dealt with, as the Spices Board has traditionally been responsible for the exports, quality control, and promotion of turmeric internationally through its own existing facilities. It is yet not quite clear how the functions will be divided among the two bodies in the future.

In addition, there is the issue of representation that needs to be considered. While the Board’s state-based seats rotate around Maharashtra, Telangana, and Meghalaya at present, there are several other states of turmeric production such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka which are yet to find any way for themselves to get represented. If the Board is to be regarded as the organization working towards the benefit of all turmeric growers across India, then this integration would definitely need to be considered.

Way Forward

Some relatively concrete measures could considerably enhance the effectiveness of the Board as it changes from merely an announcement to a functioning institution. The upgradation of the NTB to the status of a Statutory Body, on the lines of the Tea Board or the Coffee Board by way of passing a dedicated Act, would ensure greater regulatory powers, reliable funding, and a certain degree of institutional security independent of any particular government in power. Without reaching the stage of providing a Minimum Support Price, the Board could initiate price stabilization/deficiency payment schemes in the most affected districts with the sanctioned fund of ₹200 crore as seed money.

Creating a public dashboard showing the Board’s achievements in terms of the number of varieties that have been developed, processing units established, the quantities of goods that have been exported after having been certified with a geographical indication will be an indication that the progress being achieved is not merely anniversary rhetoric since it tends to contain a lot more of the former than anything else. A letter of clarification regarding the specific agency responsible for certification, testing, and promoting turmeric exports will also minimize duplication of functions between the two organizations.

Finally, increasing the number of states included in the membership of the Board will enable the NTB to become legitimate as a national body rather than as a regional body which, regardless of its current political significance, has remained so thus far. None of the measures mentioned above are really very radical or expensive either; they only demand that a consistent level of political engagement be maintained, in the same way that had gotten the Board established in the first place rather than the conclusion of decades of struggle.

References

1. Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India. (2023, October 4). Government of India notifies establishment of the National Turmeric Board [Press release]. Press Information Bureau. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1964083

2. Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India. (2025, January 14). Union Minister for Commerce and Industry Shri Piyush Goyal launches National Turmeric Board [Press release]. Press Information Bureau. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2092719

3. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. (2025, June 29). Union Home Minister and Minister of Cooperation Shri Amit Shah inaugurates the headquarters of the National Turmeric Board in Nizamabad, Telangana [Press release]. Press Information Bureau. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2140623

4. Ingredients Network. (2025). About the National Turmeric Board. https://www.ingredientsnetwork.com/national-turmeric-board-comp475816.html

5. Drishti IAS. (2025). National Turmeric Board. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/national-turmeric-board

6. Adda247 Current Affairs. (2025). National Turmeric Board launched to elevate India’s ‘Golden Spice’. https://currentaffairs.adda247.com/national-turmeric-board-launched-to-elevate-indias-golden-spice/

7. Deccan Herald. (2025, June 30). Amit Shah inaugurates Turmeric Board headquarters in Nizamabad. https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india%2Ftelangana%2Famit-shah-inaugurates-turmeric-board-headquarters-in-nizamabad-3607525

8. The Federal. (2022). There’s no end to Telangana turmeric farmers’ misery. https://thefederal.com/states/south/telangana/theres-no-end-to-telanganas-turmeric-farmers-misery

9. Deccan Herald. (2019). Establishment not required for a single spice, centre rules out separate Turmeric Board. https://www.deccanherald.com/india/establishment-not-required-for-a-single-spice-centre-rules-out-separate-turmeric-board-962647.html

10. News on Air. (2026). National Turmeric Board is empowering farmers & promoting turmeric export: Union Minister Piyush Goyal. https://www.newsonair.gov.in/national-turmeric-board-is-empowering-farmers-promoting-turmeric-export-union-minister-piyush-goyal

11. Donthi, N. R. (2023). National Turmeric Board [LinkedIn post]. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/national-turmeric-board-prof-narasimha-reddy-donthi

12. Wikipedia. (n.d.). Spices Board of India. In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 14, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spices_Board_of_India

13. IMPRI. (2025). Strengthening Bihar’s Makhana industry: The role of Makhana Board. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/policy-update/nourish-makhana-industry/

About The Contributor

Sandra Menon is a Research and Editorial Intern at IMPRI and a first-year Master’s student in Public Policy at M.O.P. Vaishnav College for Women, Chennai. Her academic interests lie in public policy and governance.

Acknowledgement

The author extends sincere thanks to the IMPRI team for their guidance.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.

Reviewed by: Devanandana C & Amrutha Lahari Kolluru

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