LAHORE, July 1: Acting on the complaint of Kissan Board of Pakistan, the anti-corruption department has unearthed a fraud involving millions of rupees in the collection of abiana for crops covered by Fordwah Canal in Bahawalnagar district.
The record for only 20 of the 450 villages covered by the canal has so far been examined. The department has already found discrepancies to the tune of Rs1.56 million for the sugarcane crop alone. The record is still being assessed for two other major crops, cotton and wheat.
The Fordwah Canal, which starts at Head Sulemanki and irrigates a very fertile area in Bahawalnagar district, where sugarcane is the main crop because of a sugar mill in the area.
The department got a list of crops prepared by the sugar mill and compared it with the one prepared by local patwaris. It found out that over 9,200 acres of sugarcane crop had not been shown in the official gardawri and replaced with other low-abiana crops like millet or maize.
The mill in the area prepares it own list to ascertain the magnitude and possible supply of the crop. Farmers from the area claim that the mill only enrols 85 per cent of the actually cultivated area. The farmers who do not provide crop to the mill are excluded from the list. The list prepared by patwaris still fell short of the target by a huge margin, with hefty sums missing.
“The Kissan Board Pakistan had formally informed the irrigation department, which placed the responsibility on the anti-corruption department,” claims the secretary-general, Ibrahim Mughal. Representatives of the KBP were now sitting with officials of the anti-corruption department and scrutinizing the record village by village, he said.
If the same yardstick was applied to the rest of 330 villages and their record scrutinized by the department, these patwaris have made at least Rs30 million from just one crop. The other major crops are cotton and wheat.
Explaining the discrepancy, farmers from the area, who had been transported to Lahore, said that these patwaris hardly included 10 per cent of the crop in their gardawris to hide their corruption.
Dilating upon their allegations, Chaudhry Abdur Rashid, district president of the Kissan Board, said that these patwaris had become too powerful to be made accountable for their actions under any law. Some of them had been serving in the area for the last 15 years, and no one transferred them. They simply do not fill up the government forms in accordance with the legal requirements till the final stage, and when they do, they rig the records to hide their corrupt practices. They replace the sugarcane crop, with abiana due at Rs177 per acre, with that of millet that costs Rs34 per acre. In the record, a patwari has shown only 30 acres of sugarcane in a village of 1000 acres. Patwaris do so to accommodate big landlords.
“Dhalbash (the final report) hardly shows 15 per cent of the total cultivated area,” says Abdul Majeed. Carrying the record in big bundles, patwaris do not fill up the forms with black ink as per legal requirement but with lead pencil, which is very easy to temper with as and when required.
KBP president Sadiq Khaqwani said that the board had taken up the case after thoroughly checking the record and being convinced about its veracity. But he feared that records might be tempered with or burnt altogether after publication of the news. For this reason, he said, the relevant record must be taken into official custody.
Patwaris are able to temper with the record because they submit their final assessment of the Kharif crop in January when the crop has already been harvested. In order to avoid this, the government must force them to prepare the list by mid-September or mid-October, which would enable other officials to verify patwaris’ claims.
“This is one of the smallest irrigation canals with a capacity of 2,600 cusecs,” says another farmer from the area. If a small portion of a small canal generates Rs30 million for patwaris, one can well imagine the situation in areas that are covered by bigger canals, he said.