Despite the passage of about two months, Sindh food department could not arrange godowns to store the procured wheat of over 0.8 million metric tons, it was learnt on Wednesday. The Sindh food department had achieved its wheat procurement target of 1.5 million metric tons in the month of May 2011 but it has yet to make arrangements for storing the wheat.
The food department has been exercising this practice for the last many years and it has the capacity of storing about 0.7 million metric tons of wheat in its official godowns. Despite this fact, Sindh government has not made any serious efforts for the construction of more in-door godowns in order to meet the increasing need of wheat storage. So far, more than 0.8 million metric tons of wheat has been lying in open grounds of the regional centres including Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Larkana and Mirpurkhas for the last one and a half months, sources said.
Met department experts said that monsoon rains were expected any time soon and wheat worth millions of rupees lying in an open sky could be damaged if urgent measures were not taken. It is worth mentioning here that the food department had issued tenders for rented godowns about 15 days ago but so far no progress has been made in this direction.
The department had also purchased about 5,000 additional tarpaulins for protecting the large quantity of procured wheat from rains but some of the officials are of the view that these tarpaulins are not enough for covering the wheat. An official of the food department on the condition of anonymity told Business Recorder that some high officials of the department embezzle millions of rupees every year blaming rains for damaging the wheat stock.
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