MUZAFFARGARH, July 27: Travelling on Muzaffargarh-Mahmoodkot Road one comes across in the middle of deserts a farm having a watercourse surrounded by trees. It immediately catches one’s attention for it is distinctively verdant and well looked after; such is the power of nature.

But there is something more impressing, nay surprising, that the watercourse is properly bricklined. Surprising it is for the district where hardly 20 per cent of the watercourses have been bricklined and that, too, patchily. But one must not forget that the bricklined watercourse at the farm belongs to none other than agriculture secretary Fayyaz Bashir, a retired major.

The road is broken here because the water is passed through a pipeline across the passage. Many other farms at the place called Mauza Jamalwali have bricklined watercourses. These farms are owned by former servicemen who were allotted the land there.

Moving further from Mahmoodkot to Kot Addu, a passer-by finds no bricklined watercourse in the vast fields. These are the watercourses that belong to the hewers of wood and fetchers of water.

According to the Watercourse Management Department, only 67 of the 300 watercourses in Muzaffargarh district are bricklined. The watercourse bricklining programme started in 2003 by President Pervez Musharraf and was scheduled to be completed in four years, i.e, by 2007. Of the 67 bricklined watercourses, most are either incomplete or reveal use of substandard material.

At Basti Beghwala, Kot Addu tehsil, a watercourse was picked to be bricklined, but work on it was left halfway, said farmer Sajid Husain. The objective of bricklining the watercourse could not be achieved because, he said, tail-enders got water slow and a lot of water was wasted in seepage.

Zia Ahmad, a farmer of Sultan Colony, alleged that Nespak officials were not cooperating with them and their watercourse had been without brickline for the past 10 months.

Assistant District Officer (watercourse) Muneer Akbar told Dawn that the bricklining project could not be completed because of non-cooperation of farmers and unavailability of funds. He said last year they could not work on the project because DCO Tariq Najib Najmi had stopped funds.

Besides, he said, the agriculture department had no engineers to supervise the project. He said over 100 watercourses were incomplete because of differences among farmers most of whom differ on watercourse path.

District Officer (social welfare) Rehmat Jaffrey said watercourses were bricklined under the CCB programme under which 20 per cent of the cost was borne by farmers and the remaining by the government.

He said he had received only 12 applications for the registration of CCB this year and sent these files to the watercourse management department which approved only two of the cases. He said it was quite difficult to work through the CCBs for which they had no funds.