KARACHI, March 14: The Sindh ministry of agriculture is to buy a fleet of 35 bulldozers at an estimated cost of Rs246.9 million to bring 2.5 million acres of barren land under cultivation, ministry sources revealed on Friday.
The earthmoving machinery will be used to provide land development facility to farmers. The project is a part of Rs800 million programme chalked out to purchase about 100 bulldozers during subsequent years.
Tenders for the purchase of earthmoving machinery have been floated to invite bids from foreign manufacturers as the machines are not produced locally.
The ministry hopes to increase cultivable area by 15 to 20 per cent during the current fiscal year with the help of modern earthmoving machinery.
The new bulldozers will replenish existing fleet of earthmoving machinery, maintained by the ministry. The bulldozers are provided to farmers on 50 per of market rates for levelling earth.
The ministry said that it was for the time that the government would purchase earthmoving machinery for levelling of agricultural land as in the past it was supplied under a grant from the Japanese government. The grant was stopped after the economic sanctions were imposed after Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998.
Director Engineering at the ministry Agha Abdul Qadir told Dawn that levelling of farm land to achieve maximum crop was a permanent exercise as not only barren land is prepared for crops but cultivated land which become weak in fertility due to raised beds is also levelled with the help of machinery.
He said that to meet the food needs of an ever-increasing population there was a need to bring more land under crops and the objective could be achieved by turning barren land into cultivable tract.
The earthmoving machinery is also used to retrieve more land for cultivation by clearing jungle. It is also used to make a passage through congested jungle for police operation against notorious dacoits.
Meanwhile, the ministry will buy machinery for setting up five cold storages in the crop-producing areas, mainly fruits and vegetable, for safe passage of the produce from farm to market.
The ministry is also helping farmers by providing other machinery such as wheat and rice thrashers on 50 per cent subsidy. It helped farmers by installing 982 tube-wells on the same subsidy rates last year while it would install 500 tube-wells this year.
It is also assisting farmers by installing sprinklers and deep irrigation system for conservation of water. It has installed 20 sprinklers at a cost of Rs4 million during last two years.
