NARC land issue: Scientists claim MNA behind move

ISLAMABAD:

Environmentalists on Thursday said a PML-N lawmaker was behind the idea of converting premises of country’s largest agriculture research centre into a housing scheme.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif recently gave a go-ahead to the Capital Development Authority (CDA) for its plans to shore up estimated Rs150 billion by establishing a housing colony on 1400 acres of National Agriculture Research Council (NARC) land.

Agricultural scientists on Thursday addressed a press conference at Pakistan Academy of Sciences (PAS). Former adviser to NARC chairman, Nadeem Iqbal, said an MNA was behind the move. “A hundred acres of his ancestral land is located adjacent to the NARC land. The price of the MNA’s landholding will multiply manifold if the project is executed,” Iqbal claimed.

Rejecting the government proposal for shifting NARC to an alternative piece of land, Iqbal said, “It is height of ignorance that the policymakers do not understand that several labs including the Germplasm cannot be moved.”

NARC houses experimental fields, laboratories, green houses, a gene bank, a library, a documentation centre, an auditorium, machinery and lab equipment repair workshops. “We will not allow bulldozing research labs,” Iqbal said.

PARC Scientists Association President Mohammad Altaf detailed NARC’s contributions to the country’s agriculture sector over the past 60 years. He said the National Reference Lab of Poultry Diseases of NARC had saved Rs90 billion to poultry industry since 2006, by making Pakistan the only bird-flue-free country in SAARC.

Counting the contributions of NARC, the participants said that wheat yield was eight million tons per annum about 25 years ago but was now 24 million tons, due to various varieties of wheat introduced by NARC.

They said in the heart of the New Dehli, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has been established on 500 hectares of land but none of the political regime ever thought to shift the body somewhere else and build a housing colony on its land.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 19^th, 2015.