June 24, 2008	Tuesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 19, 1429

HYDERABAD, June 23: The recently-formed Sindh Tail Abadgar Welfare Board on Monday blamed ‘an unholy alliance of big feudal lords and irrigation officials’ for the perennial shortage of water at the tail-end areas of almost all the channels and waterways in the province.

The board’s president Gul Mohammad Laghari and a number of other office-bearers said at a news conference at the press club that the government should take serious measures to ensure water was supplied to tail-end areas and carry out desilting and remodelling of Rohri Canal and other channels.

They said that the board would struggle for the restoration of basic rights of tail-end growers and demanded suspension of the chief engineer of Sukkur Barrage and the XEN of Naseer Division, accusing them of complicity in depriving tail-end growers of their due share of water.

They suggested that Ranger should be deployed for five years along the canals in tail-end areas to ensure judicious distribution of water. A special agriculture package should be announced for the tail-end growers, their area should be declared calamity-hit and they should be exempted from payment of all taxes, they urged.

They demanded that all the illegal direct outlets should be closed, rotation programme should be announced for the approved DOs and all the DOs sanctioned after 1988 should be cancelled. They called for an end to rotation programme, lining of all the canals and watercourses and construction of metalled roads on the canals’ inspection paths.

The board leaders demanded closure of illegal lift machines, pipes and cuts on all the canals, sealing the watercourses running without modules or without channel plate system, construction of RCC modules and removal of technical faults in all regulators.

They said that the government should launch a tube-well scheme on the pattern of SCARP in water-deficit areas, exempt agricultural machinery from all taxes and give 50 per cent subsidy in power bill for tube-wells.

They appealed to the president and the prime minister, governor and chief minister, minister and secretary for irrigation to solve their problems else they reserved the right to protest.

They said that the formation of a new growers’ body had become inevitable for the protection of the interests of tens of thousands of tail-end farmers, peasants and farm workers.

To a question whether Sindh Chamber of Agriculture and Sindh Abadgars Board were not doing enough to safeguard their rights, the board members stressed that the two bodies were tackling general issues relating to agriculture sector while their organisation would exclusively deal with the problems of tail-end growers.They pointed out that the government’s indifference towards this important sector during last few years had given rise to hunger, poverty, joblessness, lawlessness, violence and social evils.

The agriculture sector of the province had been pushed to the verge of destruction and acute shortage of water in tail-end areas had forced tens of thousands of growers, haris and farm workers to starve, the board members said.

Thousands of people associated with the sector had been forced to leave their ancestral homes in search of greener pastures. Even the land owners who owned more than 100 acres were collecting firewood to feed their families, they said and added the worsening conditions were forcing people to desert village after village, they said.

How ironic that even drinking water was not available for human beings and livestock and for bathing the dead at the tail-end of the waterways, they said.