Pakistan Cotton Ginners' Association (PCGA) Chairman Mahesh Kumar has dispelled this impression that the reconstituting of Pakistan Central Cotton Committee (PCCC) would lead the country to a bias and unauthentic data as private sector could be manipulated cotton date according to its own wish.
He said the PCGA provided accurate and authentic data about the arrival of cotton in ginneries and disposal of cotton bales. It collected figures of cotton arrival, ginning and disposal of stock on fortnightly basis which were made public 24 hours after the collection, he contended.
He said PCCC in public sector failed to issue actual and accurate figures of production during the last decade. After the reconstituting of Cotton Body the government's role had almost ended to fix cotton production target and to present cotton data as the government would have to only depend on private sector's data, he added. He said that a report published in April this year by Global Agriculture Information Network (GAIN) projected Pakistan's cotton production for the year 2012-13, as 10 percent increase in area and production. Mahesh Kumar said that flood and rains had badly hit the cotton crop in some areas, adding in spite of that "we are expecting production of more than 14.5 million bales of cotton."