The Federal State Minister for Food, Agriculture and Livestock on Saturday discussed in detail progress on improving efficiency, reliability and equity of irrigation water system and situation of cotton crop in a meeting at Circuit House here.
Nazir Ahmed Ursani, Director General Agriculture Engineering and On-Farm Water Management, informed the minister that survey design of water courses by district government was in progress and work would start soon after the completion of the survey.
He said that under the World Bank sponsored plan work on 4000 water courses would be started by the district government through water consumers associations (WCA).
He said the amount would be transferred to District Co-ordinators Account and would be spent by WCA in their respective areas under the supervision of district government while Agriculture Engineering would monitor the work and, wherever needed, provide technical assistance.
He said that water courses improvement plan was getting good response from the growers, knowingly that they have to provide manual labour or cost of labour.
The Director General Agriculture Extension and Research Muhammad Akram Malik informed the minister that field reports indicated that cotton crop was satisfactory despite extremely poor availability of water and picking was in progress. He quoted the figures of seed-cotton arrivals at ginneries and said that the arrivals, as compared to corresponding period of last year, were virtually double.