SANGHAR, April 8: Growers of the district have condemned marketing of substandard cotton seed by some Punjab companies. Talking to this correspondent on Thursday , Samo Dahri, Yar Mohammad Leghari of the Sindh Abadgar Board and others accused the Federal Seed Certification and Registration Department of marketing the inferior quality seed.

They alleged it contained eggs of pink ball worms. The growers said the companies procure Niab-78 cotton seed from ginning factories and pack it in beautiful cloth bags to sell it at exorbitant rates. They alleged that the rate of cotton seed in ginning factories was between Rs450 to Rs500 but the seed companies had been selling the same at the rate of Rs1,200 to Rs1,500.

The multinational companies marketed the same at Rs2,000 to Rs3,000. They said there were more than 11,000 workers in the agriculture extension department and thousands in the research wing but they had not been able to make a single bag of seed.

They expressed serious reservations about the way of issuing tags of certified seed to companies. They demanded that the FSCRD should provide serial numbers at least to every district headquarter in Sindh.

They said at present growers were not able to achieve desired plant population even after applying more than 10kg seed, while the desired plant population should have been 3-4kg on ridge and 5-6kg on drill cultivation.