MULTAN: Provincial Parliamentary secretary on agriculture MPA Rana Ijaz Ahmad Noon directed the agriculture engineers to promote farm mechanization in their respective areas on priority to give a boost to agriculture production.
Addressing a workshop of manufacturers at Agriculture Mechanization Research Institute (AMRI) here on Monday, Ijaz Noon said the dream of phenomenal increase in agriculture production can only materialize by virtue of preferential adoption of farm mechanization.
Additional secretary (Admin) agriculture Punjab, Muhammad Akhtar said the Punjab government was making strenuous efforts to produce two million skilled workers in different disciplines during five year period.
He said that manufacturers should take advantage of this opportunity and must contact Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (Tevta) to design training programmes for improvement of skills of their unskilled labour.
He advised agriculture engineers to work on cost-effective and efficient alternatives of bulldozers to enable poor farmers opt for mechanization without worrying about cost.
Additional secretary said that efforts for agriculture machinery development must be in the right direction while keeping in view the advancements in the world.
He said that spraying machines should be manufactured while keeping in view the safety of workers.
He said that officials should evaluate the quality and specifications of tractors and other agriculture machinery before these are handed over to farmers at subsidized prices under the government schemes so that the equipment is able to generate profits for farmers and contribute handsomely in increasing agriculture production.
Director AMRI Ghulam Siddiq said that Pakistan’s crop production area was 69 per cent and cultivated area was 30.7 million acres.
The culturable waste land in the country was 3.9 million acre which can be converted into cultivated area through deployment of skilled work force and heavy machinery, he added.
However, he said that there were 500,000 tractors in Punjab in addition to 338 bulldozers which prepare almost 20,000 acre land for cultivation per year.
He said that per acre application of mechanization equipment in Punjab in terms of Horse Power was only 0.88 compared to 1.01 in India, 2.23 in China, and 3.80 in Japan. Progressive grower Mumtaz Ahmad Khan Minais said on the occasion that government should lift ban on import of tractors to enable farmers avail new generation technology that is environment friendly and consumes low fuel. He said that local manufacturers were providing old technology tractors to farmers.
He also demanded that government should establish Customer Hire Services Centre to enable farmers hire tractors and other machinery at affordable charges.
Manufacturers said on the occasion that unavailability of raw material, many taxes, loadshedding and higher power tariff were the main hurdles in manufacturing agriculture machinery. The parliamentary secretary on agriculture observed that public-private partnership initiatives can benefit the farmers only when there will be coordination between public and private sector and added that manufacturing companies would also earn reasonable profit.
