Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Punjab President, Mian Manzoor Ahmed Wattoo has said the stormy rain has adversely damaged the crops of wheat, maize and fodder on thousands of acres of Depalpur area of district Okara.
In a statement issued on Sunday, Manzoor Watoo said that due to the thunderstorm and hailstorms the crops of maize and wheat on thousands of acres of the villages of Depalpur from Bahawaldas to Boman Shah, Sharifabad, Pasel, Bota Kot, Carry Wala, Nawan Kot, Farid Pur, Jagir, S P 45, Pandit Mesol pur, Qila Deva Sikh, Jagir Abad, Jesuke Suhaq, Amel ke Suhag, Ranju Tahir, Bawa Tahir, and other numerous villages have faced destruction.
He urged the government to immediately take the notice and announce relief package for the affected growers. While commenting on the Kissan package of Rs 100 millions of the chief minister, Mian Manzoor Wattoo said the package was no different from the PM Kissan package of Rs 341 billion.
He added that the Kissan package is just a lollipop for the farmers, as the farmers were not even getting the cost price for their production.
PPP provincial president maintained that the farmers are devastated economically due to the losses inflicted by the fifth successive wheat crops, solely attributed to the anti-farmers policy of the PML-N government.
He further added that due to anti-farmers policies of the present government, the growers had been continuously facing losses, and agriculture economy had been destroyed completely. He demanded that the government should abandon its anti-farmers policies adding that the government is pushing the farmers to a kamikaze situation.
Manzoor Watoo said that the growers are not in a position to fulfill their family needs, and they had no resources to send their children to school. While raising a question about the fair distribution of Kissan package, he alleged that the government rewarded a very small amount to farmers at first, and spent billions of rupees on two metro projects and now packages are being given to only a small section of favourite farmers through patwaris.
He maintained that the consensus had emerged among the farmers’ community that the incumbent government was hell-bent to destroy the agriculture of the country for the reasons known to them, adding the present situation is so critical that even those who had taken land on the lease were leaving their crops, as they were not getting their payments.
The PPP leader regretted that the government did not understand the vital linkage between the development of agriculture and the development of the country and it is only wasting national resource on metro buses and orange trains like show off projects. The development of agriculture means prosperity of the two-thirds population of the country because its livelihood depends on agriculture directly or indirectly, he observed.