PESHAWAR, Aug 31: Flour mills in the NWFP would start receiving wheat from the provincial government's storehouses in a next couple of days, official sources said here on Tuesday.

The resumption of supply would enable the mills to resume work after remaining closed for about four months.

"Disbursement of wheat from the official stocks to flour mills across the province will be resumed shortly," Deputy Director of Food Anwar Khan, told Dawn on Tuesday. He said that after fulfilling certain procedural requirements aimed at ensuring transparency the directorate's wheat disbursement operations would start during the next couple of days, if not from the officially required date, i.e. Sept 1.

There are more than 260 flour mills in NWFP of which some 160 are officially recognized as operational mills. Only the operational mills would be provided wheat from the government's storehouses from where every mill would be released specific quantity of wheat.

For this purpose, mills would be issued wheaton the basis of officially fixedquotaandthe disbursement would take place in accordance with the officially laid down schedule which was being finalized by the provincial government's authorities concerned.

The ban imposed by the government of Punjab in the last week of April this year prohibiting transportation of wheat to other parts of the country from the area under its jurisdiction left flour mills situated in Sindh, Balochistan and NWFP under depression.

The flour mills situated in the NWFP were hit the most as Punjab's open market forms the only source for them to procure wheat in the absence of sufficient local wheat crop yields and due to non-disbursement of wheat from the official god owns between May 1 and August 31, every year.

"Ninety-nine per cent of the remaining 160 operational flour mills that had survived the shortage of the last four difficult years in which the NWFP's flour mills industry went through recession mainly because of wheat shortages also experienced closure as a result of unilateral ban imposed by the Punjab," said Mr Naeem Butt, the President of the Pakistan Flour Mills Association (PFMA), NWFP.

Official and independent circles have expressed the hope that the resumption of wheat disbursement operations from the official godowns to flour mills in NWFP would ease out the pressure majority of the mills were encountering for the last four months.

This would help most of the closed flour mills to resume their operations and reemploy thousands of daily wagers who had been rendered jobless after most of the mills underwent closure due to non-availability of wheat.

In accordance with the open market policy adopted by the last government, flour mills are provided a fixed quantity of wheat from the official godowns between Sept 1 and April 30 every year.

Though disbursement of wheat from official stocks are supposed to start from Wednesday, it might take couple of more days before the food directorate formally starts its operations.

"Wheat will be provided to only those mills which are operational and for this purpose the directorate is conducting an exercise to verify the number of mills that stand operational," said the deputy director, food.

He said that the exercise would not take too much time and in certain cases certificates had also been issued by the directorate to the operational mills. In every district, he maintained, a three-member committee comprising representatives of the food department, industrial development department and the PFMA, NWFP, would verify that which one of the mills was operational or not.