The Purnendu Chatterjee-owned The Chatterjee Group (TCG) has teamed up with Luxmi Tea Company, one of the oldest planters and tea manufacturers, to work on new medicinal plants related research and development. This will be part of TCG’s fresh investment plans of Rs 8,000 crore in West Bengal.

Luxmi Tea, an end-to-end tea manufacturer — from plucking to warehousing and packaging — has gardens in North Bengal, Assam and Tripura and produces over 15 million kg of tea annually. TCG Lifesciences, a subsidiary of TCG and a leading contract research services and informatics company with operations in India, the UK and the US in the area of drug discovery and development, will be involved with the R&D.

Disclosing this, a top TCG official told Financial Chronicle, “Luxmi Tea has more than 200 acres of tea garden land between Siliguri and Jalpaiguri where we will jointly work on growing new medicinal plants, which would then be bro-ught to TCG Lifesciences’ (formerly Chembiotek Research International) laboratory in Kolkata for extensive R&D. TCG Lifescie-nces, which has additional land adjacent to its existing facility, will develop that for this purpose.”

TCG and Luxmi Group may also work on some realty projects on the surplus land (after growing these new medicinal plants).

TCG chairman Purnendu Chatterjee who met West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee here on Wednesday, later told newspersons that the chief minister had “shared some bright ideas with him on expanding TCG Lifesciences activities, working on some new medicinal plants.”

TCG will also build a new Eco IT Infrastructure at Sector-V, Kolkata, the foundation stone for which will be unveiled on July 16.