Under World Bank-financed Rs 68.672B PRIAT project, Punjab govt urged farmers to take advantage of opportunity by adopting climate-smart technologies to upgrade water systems
Under a World Bank-financed Rs 68.672 billion Punjab Resilient and Inclusive Agriculture Transformation (PRIAT) project, the Punjab government has urged farmers to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by adopting climate-smart technologies to upgrade their water systems and make them resilient to extreme weather events so they can irrigate their crop fields efficiently and at a lower cost.
The upgrade is available at a heavily discounted price over a five-year period. According to information available on the World Bank website, posted on July 14 of last year, the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank approved $200 million in financing to support Pakistan in transforming the agricultural sector by adopting climate-smart technologies to improve water use efficiency, build resilience to extreme weather events, and increase the incomes of small farmers.
According to an agriculture spokesman, the five-year project, which runs from 2022 to 2027, entails improving water courses, re-constructing older water courses that have reached the end of their useful lives, installing contemporary drip and sprinkler systems in rain-fed areas with solar systems to power them, and building ponds for water storage.
However, he added that different schemes would have different cost-sharing formulas, with a significant portion of costs, such as 70–80 percent, to be borne by the government and the remaining by the farmers. The spokesman did not specifically state how much subsidy would be offered.
According to the spokesman, a second large-scale national project for improving waterways is now in its second phase. When both of these major projects are finished, Pakistan’s agriculture will experience a significant uptick in both irrigated and, most importantly, rain-fed arid agriculture areas, and the nation’s agricultural output will increase significantly.
Farmers who want to take advantage of the service being provided under the groundbreaking project are urged to visit the office of the deputy director water management or assistant director water management, or they can also visit the website at http://ofwm.agripunjab.gov.pk.