Have you heard of 'E-nose'? If not, wait till you buy your tea packet from the super market next time.

Soon, tea produced and packed in India will be tested by an 'electronic nose' developed indigenously by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.

'E-nose' developed by the CDAC scientists is a mechanized 'nose' that can detect complex odours and potentially help lead to better quality teas.

Scientists said 'E-nse' has been ddesigned to discriminate among complex odours using an array of sensors. The instrument is tuned and treated with a variety of odour-sensitive biological or chemical materials.

An odour stimulus generates a characteristic fingerprint or pattern, and based on these patterns the teas can be classified, identified and graded as odour lends flavour to tea.

The usual practice of tea-tasting is that tasters manually taste teas by sipping it and rolling it on their tongue and inhaling the smell. At the auction centres, professional tea tasters of major brokerage firms taste the teas manually before fixing their grades.

The tea taster's job will be taken up by the electronic devise that is capable of sensing compounds of tea and predicting the scores that are otherwise manually calculated by tea tasters.

The instrument can also be used to monitor volatile emission patterns during the tea fermentation process in the factories, now done manually, when the plucked tea leaves are used to manufacture teas.

J K Thomas, president of the tea growers' body United Planters Association of South India and vice-president of the government tea trade promotion body, Tea Board, says a prototype of 'E-nose' was demonstrated recently during a workshop organized by the board's National Tea Research Foundation in Kolkata.

According to him, the quality of tea manufactured was at present determined only after the process was complete, which did not help in correcting the situation.

The United Planters Association of Southern India has already urged the Tea Board and the National Tea Research Foundation to make the tea quality-monitoring instrument `E-nose' available to the industry at the earliest.

India tea has been hit by quality issues in 2001 when Libya rejected tea imports from the country because of poor quality. After prolonged negotiations, when Libya finally agreed to import tea from India in 2004, the new tea shipped out failed to meet quality parameters.

Since then, tea tasting has been stricting enforced by the Tea Board which has also imposed strict quality norms for both export and import of tea.