The agriculture poverty of Mianwali - Newspaper dawn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dawn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Sheikhupura is famous for its quality rice and historical places. The city itself was founded by Moghul Emperor Jahangir more than four centuries ago in 1607, and made district headquarters exactly a century ago (in 1922),
Named then as Jahangirpura, with the status of a royal hunting ground, it was later renamed as Sheikhupura after Emperor Jahangir’s nickname ‘Sheikhu’ given to him by his mother. The district houses some historically significant sites including Sheikhupura Fort, Hiran Minar, mausoleum of Waris Shah at Jandiala Sher Khan, and the National Marian Shrine visited by Christians each year. Until 2005, Janam Asthan Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of the founder of Sikh religion Baba Guru Nanak, was also part of it before it was made a separate district.
A smaller and relatively young district of little less than 600,000 acres, Lodhran was carved out of Multan in 1991. With Multan turning more of a cosmopolitan urban and commercial centre in the last three decades, its offspring preferred to stay as a parental extension: socially conservative, culturally traditional and predominantly agricultural.
With industry almost non-existent, agriculture is the way of life for the district dwellers all its 600,000 acres are cultivated and divided into smallholdings for two reasons.
The massive inflow of settlers from other parts of the country during the last century was never expected to purchase bigger chunks of land. Big local, traditional and politically influential land-owning families saw their heritage divided during the same period and most of them have lost the feudal lustre. The district is thus more of a social relief in the otherwise feudal belt of South Punjab.
Punjab expects to achieve its wheat production target this season notwithstanding the negative impact of climate change. AFP/File
LAHORE: Punjab expects to achieve its wheat production target this season notwithstanding the negative impact of climate change.
“As far as the current crop situation is concerned, we’re all set to achieve the wheat output target of 20.62 million tonnes,” said a senior official of the Punjab Agriculture Department on Wednesday.
Though the province didn’t receive rains for two months January and February because of climate change, the situation is well under control for two reasons: the temperature remained lower retaining enough moisture for the growth of grain, and the area under the crop increased as compared with the last year, Punjab Crop Reporting Service Director Dr Abdul Qayyum told Dawn.
If proof is needed for under-utilisation, ineffectiveness, irrelevance or even failure of agriculture institutions, the district of Faisalabad provides it. Having four internationally-acclaimed institutions in its precinct for more than a century, its agricultural pattern and productivity are still fossilised and its performance is as good, or as bad, as that of any other bad-performing district in Punjab including the remotest one like Rajanpur.
If taken out of performance context, the names and history of these institutions are imposing. The Punjab Agricultural College and Research Institute, Lyallpur, that later morphed into a university has been there since 1906. When education and research divorced each other in 1962, the college became a university and the Ayub Research Center was born with researchers stuffed in it to lead the green revolution.