Food dept receives 850,000 applications for gunny sacks

LAHORE: The Punjab Food Department has received total 850,000 applications for gunny sacks regarding government’s wheat procurement campaign in Punjab.

The Punjab Information and Technology Board (PITB) and Punjab Land Record Authority have started testing revenue record for the verification of the applications. Due to the connivance of the local revenue staff, a large number of fake and bogus applications were received for gunny sacks. It is expected that during the record checking, more than 250,000 fake and incomplete record application would be canceled in the next three days and around 550,000 applicants would be provided government’s gunny bags.

The Punjab government started receiving applications for getting gunny sacks from April 8 across the province and the final date of submitting the applications was April 17. The food department received 859,000 applications for gunny sacks till April 17 which was 145,000 more than the previous year.

Last year, the food department received a total of 71,400 applications in which 625,000 applications were approved while in these applications, 594,000 applicants had gotten gunny sacks from the food department. The departmental source told The Express News that the farmers were given only five days to submit gunny sacks requests last year. But this time, 10 days were provided to the farmers for submitting applications. But it is also revealed that this year, the number of submitting two or more applications on one CNIC was very high.

On contacting by The Express News, Director Food Punjab Mohammad Shakir said the process of receiving the application for gunny sacks has ended on April 17 and now the process of confirmation of applications has started.

All the application data is available on the portal of Punjab Information Technology Board. After the verification process, the data of approved application would be sent to the Food Department and the applicant would be informed through SMS alerts. Responding to a question, the food director said the final decision to approve the applications would be taken by the food secretary.