PUNJAB has recently notified two dozen research and development boards and their chairmen to lead their institutions towards ‘demand based’ research.

These boards are mostly headed by active farmers and cover almost all major crops and important areas like soil fertility, plant pathology and post-harvest issues. This, as the term of reference reads, would reorient the entire province’s research planning.

The 21-point terms of reference (ToR), accompanying the notification, also empowers these boards to redefine their research agenda, propose an annual plan, suggest crop technology for existing and new seed varieties, assess the performance of institutions and scientists, advise incentives for researchers for better research, identify the need for future R&D and protect the interest of all stakeholders.

Sixty per cent of the board members would come from the private sector. In their three-year life, the boards are also expected to review ways and means for production, productivity enhancement, cost of production and exports.

Terming the formation of boards a step in the right direction, the farmers, however, are still cautious of putting their entire weight behind this plan — unless more concrete steps follow.

Growers have been harsh critics of the current research patterns, which, according to them, have not served them in the last seven decades.

“The cotton leaf curl virus is one proof of the stupendous failure of the research regime in Pakistan,” asserts Abad Khan of the Farmers Associates Pakistan.

There are no budgets indicated for these boards, which could give them some measure of financial independence. The notification has come with no standard operating procedures (SOPs)

Similarly, the super basmati rice seed could not be improved either, resulting in loss of export market. One can quote countless such examples.

These failures have led farmers’ to demand a reorientation of research planning: linking it to crops, soil and the market, he explains.

Farmers say their demand was two-fold: putting them in charge of research oversight so that they could tell researchers precisely what they need from them and, more crucially, financial independence and legal power to execute the consequent results.

Punjab has had such boards for sugarcane, cotton and cess money that have financial autonomy.

Unlike the sugarcane and cotton boards, the new boards have been created through departmental notification, not provincial laws.

However, there are no budgets indicated for these boards which could give them some measure of financial independence.

The notification has come with detailed ToRs but no standard operating procedures (SOPs) that could have clarified their exact role.

“The government has certainly taken the first, and perhaps the most crucial, step,” claims Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan of the Agriculture University, Faisalabad. One hopes that the second part would follow soon. Farmers are right in demanding a statutory structure and budgeting rights for these boards because these are essential to their performance, concedes the vice-chancellor of the agriculture university.

Farmers feel that if these boards remain under departmental or bureaucratic control for procedural and financial matters, and that there is not much they would be able to achieve.

They feel that their representative bodies should have been involved in the entire process: defining a potential role for the new boards and outlining possible ToRs and SOPs.

These issues should not be finalised by the agriculture department alone. Had the farmers’ bodies recommended the names of their representatives as heads or members of the boards, they could have been held accountable for the boards’ performance.

In the current case, these individuals have been named on the basis of their own merits and connections — not through any institutional arrangement.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, May 1st, 2017