Farmers’ cut: Agriculture department gets twice the bounty

Several development schemes converted to running projects, creating jobs.

PESHAWAR: An increase of more than 100% has been made in the allocation for the agriculture department in the provincial budget.

For the fiscal year 2014-15, a sum of Rs3.14 billion has been set aside for the department. In the current fiscal year, this allocation stood at Rs1.53 billion for 51 projects of which 18 schemes were completed.

For the upcoming fiscal year, the agriculture allocation will also cover 46 mega projects in the sector. Of these, 15 are new schemes.

According to a budget document, K-P’s economy is predominantly agrarian with more than 80% of the rural population depending on agriculture for its livelihood.

Food insecurity

The province is short of food commodities and produces hardly 40% of the local requirement.  The remaining requirement is met through importing food commodities from other provinces.  Therefore, to tackle food insecurity, the government has converted the development scheme ‘High-value Chain Crop Research Institute Bamkhel’ in Swabi into a running project, thus creating 48 new posts at the institute. The project will facilitate the public by providing high-quality seeds.

Furthermore, a soil conservation office has been established in Torghar district and 12 posts of different categories have been created. Moreover, under the Annual Development Programme, agriculture has been allocated Rs2.45 billion.

Protecting livestock

Similarly, a sum of Rs1.7 million has been allocated for livestock in the fiscal year 2014-15.

K-P has about 21 million animals which need to be vaccinated every year and require approximately 42 million doses. However, the local vaccine production is hardly at 2 million doses per year.

Therefore, the government has converted the development scheme ‘The preparation and evaluation of trivalent foot and mouth disease vaccine’ to a running project in the Livestock and Dairy Development department.

As a result of this, 32 posts have been created and high-quality vaccines for livestock will become available.

The income generated from the local production of vaccine will cover not only the entire cost of production but also earn profit for the provincial government.

Rs25 million is the revenue expected to be generated per year in case the department covers 10% vaccine requirements of the province. 

Published in The Express Tribune, June 16^th, 2014.