FAISALABAD City News

‘Lack of skilled manpower hammering agri progress’

From Our Correspondent

FAISALABAD: The lack of agricultural machinery, implements and skilled manpower is hammering the process of agricultural uplift in the country, said University of Agriculture Faisalabad Vice-Chancellor Prof Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan.

He was addressing a seminar on tractor parts at the UAF on Friday. The VC said that farmers did not have sophisticated machinery even for five major crops. He urged the developers to introduce efficient and low cost farm machinery not only to increase the productivity but to facilitate the farming community. He said that horse powers of tractors were underutilised due to lack of trained manpower. He said that available planters and harvesters in the country had become outdated, adding that reverse engineering of imported farm machinery would help manufacturing low cost and durable machinery at local level. He said that in the modern era, it had become a need of the hour to adopt state-of-the-art tools to increase productivity amid increasing population. He said that farmers must be trained how to use the machinery in order to ensure its efficiency. The VC said that we had 1.2 million tube-wells only in Punjab and only 0.2 million of them were being operated on electricity. The half of the rest of them was being run through tube-wells that was the wastage of energy and termed it inefficient use of 55 horse power tractor. A representative of a group Amjad Wazir said that India per acre productivity was more than Pakistan due to usage of the sophisticated machinery. He lauded the UAF role in the uplift of agricultural sector as it was mother of all agri educational institution in the sub-continent. He said that his company was developing tractor engines, generators and other automats of the international level that were being exported to 32 countries of the world.