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| April 27, 2003 | Sunday | Safar 24, 1424 |
Growers slam shortage of farm machinery
SANGHAR, April 26: Local farmers on Saturday complained about shortage of the agricultural machinery from the Sindh Agricultural Engineering Department while criticizing the department for inordinate delays regarding acquisition of the same.
When contacted by this correspondent, farmers said that the level of disrepair of the machinery was evident in the department’s workshop here.
They said that skeletons of numerous land-levellers, bulldozers, tractors and other farm machines could be seen lying scattered in the department’s workshops at Sanghar, Tando Jam, Badin and other areas all over Sindh.
An official of the department told this correspondent that therre was a severe shortage of spare parts, adding that funds were needed to bring these dying machines in working condition.
The last consignment of bulldozers, he said, was received by this department in 1991.
He said that while the normal working life of these machines was 10,000 hours, most of them have clocked over 25,000 working hours.
Farmers also complained that they had to wait for months after depositing the advance payment for booking these machines.
Describing the miserable working condition of the machines, they said that mechanical breakdowns were frequent, adding that sometimes they occur as soon as the machine reach their farms.
They said that if they were found one, they had to pay for the spares as these were unavailable at the department’s workshops. In addition to all this, they said, they had to bear other expenses of the machine’s operators.
The official of the department, meanwhile, had another tale of woes regarding the 22 laser-land levellers.
These state-of-the-art machines, he said, had been imported from the United States, costing about a million rupees a piece.
For about eight years, he said, these machines remained in the crates in which they were shipped as no one — either in the department or the farm community — was aware about the usefulness of these machines.
The use of these machines, he said, started after the high- ups of the department and farmers saw these same machines perform miracles in Punjab.
These farm machines, he said, were indispensable in view of the shortage of irrigation water. Farmers, he said, literally queued for acquiring the services of one of these machines on their farms but only 11 out of the 22 machines were in working condition in Sindh.
Farmers, meanwhile, complained that hiring one of the land-levellers for tilling their land was a tedious job as prerequisites, included “favouritism, nepotism and other considerations” as almost all of the machines were booked by big landlords.
Hassan Askari, general secretary of the Small Growers’ Association, and Yar Mohammad Leghari of the Sindh Abadgar Board, when contacted by this correspondent, said that farmers in Sindh needed at least 300 laser levellers and 400 new bulldozers.
They urged the government to provide bulldozers to farmers in Sindh at the same rate on which farmers in Balochistan were being given farm machinery.
He also criticised farmers, saying that they were equally responsible for the sorry state of affairs. Mr Askari said that farmers routinely replaced the costlier usable parts of the tractors hired from the department with unusable parts from their own machines.
The incharge engineer of the agricultural engineering workshop at Tando Jam, when contacted by this correspondent over telephone, refused to comment in this regard, saying he did not know about such happenings.
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