CICRA wins big at NBQSA National ICT Awards

CICRA Solutions’ historic visionary Colombo-Tea e-Auction platform won the agriculture sector award under the industrial category, at the 2021 National ICT Awards (NBQSA) ceremony.

This prestigious award is presented annually to the most innovative solutions developed to deliver automation through the integration of systems, technologies and processes for the agriculture sector. 

The NBQSA is Sri Lanka’s longest running national ICT awards ceremony for the ICT industry. The National ICT Awards recognise remarkable achievements of organisations, which have pioneered innovative ICT products. Since the NBQSA’s inception, the awards have been organised by the Sri Lankan Section of the BCS Chartered Institute for IT, over the past 23 years. 

The 137-year-old Colombo Tea Auction is the single largest and oldest tea auction in the world. The 2019 COVID lockdown threatened the very survival of Sri Lanka’s tea industry, as the traditional physical tea auction could not take place. CICRA Solutions rapidly transformed the Colombo Tea Auction from a 137-year-old physical, face-to-face system to a fully-digitised online e-auction. The platform facilitated sale of 276 million kilograms of tea during its first year of operations and generated over US $ 1.2 billion export revenue. 

Commenting on their win, CICRA Group Director/CEO Boshan Dayaratne stated, “We are honoured to have received this illustrious award and thankful to the stakeholders of the tea industry for believing in us. Despite the enormity of the challenge of digitising the auction, the CICRA team rose magnificently to the occasion. We all felt it was our duty as Sri Lankan citizens to help save the tea industry during the COVID-19 lockdown. 

The livelihood of over two million people employed in the tea sector was at risk, if we did not pull this off. The CICRA team worked tirelessly around the clock and built this extraordinary solution within a very short period of time, about seven days. We made history on April 4, 2020, when the first digital tea auction went live.
We are proud to have ensured that tea factories were able to pay salaries and bonuses to estate employees before the traditional Sinhala and Tamil New Year in 2020.”

CICRA Solutions’ Colombo Tea e-Auction platform has been lauded nationally and globally, earning several impressive accolades. It was the recipient of the ICTA e-Swabhimani 2020 national award for Business and Commerce at the e-Swabhimani Digital Social Impact Awards. In a historic first for Sri Lanka, CICRA Solutions became the first Sri Lankan company to be awarded a Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards in 2021, with the Rising Azure Technology top global award. CICRA Solutions emerged as the winners from a vast array of over 4,400 submitted nominations from more than 100 countries worldwide.