The government of Sindh intends to spend Rs6.9 billion on the agriculture sector in FY24 out of an estimated Rs700bn budget for development expenditure.

Overall, the agriculture sector’s development budget, including foreign project assistance, stood at Rs11.9bn. These development allocations included funds for new and ongoing schemes. Many schemes that were reflected in the FY23 budget books but could not be worked upon are now part of the budget.

The FY23 budget estimates were revised at Rs5.5bn after an initial Rs7.5bn estimation, according to government officials dealing with these numbers. Until June 16, the provincial finance department’s official figures put expenditure at Rs4.9 million for the agriculture department. These expenses will increase slightly when the current fiscal year ends on June 30 and district treasuries process the bills of vendors.

A breakdown of the agricultural development budget includes the following: research wing (Rs387m), extension (Rs396m), marketing (Rs125m), Sindh Seed Corporation (Rs50m), training and research (Rs25m), supply and prices component (Rs25m), agricultural mechanisation (Rs2.7bn), and water management (Rs3.3bn).

Amid limited resources, the province hopes to tackle ambitious projects such as vertical farming and drainage improvement

The total Rs11.9bn has Rs4.9bn worth of foreign assistance from the Sindh Water and Agricultural Transformation (SWAT) project funded by the World Bank. The Sindh agriculture extension department has a share of Rs4.9bn after irrigation.

Many new schemes, in addition to ongoing ones, have been included in the FY24 budget. The Agriculture Department will try to address the drainage issue, perhaps for the first time, in Sindh’s farm sector, which will be connected to a contiguous irrigation landscape.

Sindh’s farmlands were badly hit by the drainage factor, which was evident in the 2022 province-wide flooding, triggered by torrential rains, which caused large-scale displacement and inundation of productive agricultural land.

While major drain networks, like the Left Bank Outfall Drain, exist in the lower Sindh region and there are drain networks in the right bank area as well, farmland-level drainage remains nonexistent.

“Growers or farmers whose lands are located close to [major] drain networks have the luxury of disposing of their wastewater into those drains. But those who don’t have this facility end up as sufferers,” says Ejaz Mahesar, Sindh Secretary of Agriculture.

That’s why, he said, the government has planned a pilot project to be executed as an on-farm water management project in the new fiscal year at an estimated cost of Rs330m. An allocation of Rs82.5m has been made in the FY24 budgetary estimates starting with a scheme titled ‘Pilot Project regarding On-Farm Water Management’.

Major landowners have built a network on their farmland for dewatering the land during rainfall, but small- and medium-size farmers manage it without a system. Resultantly, the soil fertility of their land is diminished, or the land falls prey to salinity and water-logging. Projects like Salinity Control and Reclamation Project were designed to help but subsequently became dysfunctional.

The Lower Sindh region was hit by such a massive problem. “We had planned the introduction of this drainage scheme before the floods of 2022, but requirements didn’t lead to its finalisation. It will be executed now,” said an official. He said these drains would be constructed on farmlands under the pilot project to connect them with the main drainage network.

A 2013 report on the Regional Master Plan for the Left Bank of Indus, Delta and Coastal Zone stated, “Due to an inadequate drainage network and flat topography of basin, nearly one-fifth of canal command area is affected by water-logging and salinity.”

It had proposed that a regional master plan is urgently needed to reduce flood damage and loss of lives by improving the disposal of drainage and floodwater in the Indus River left bank area.

A multi-billion rupee Sindh Irrigated Agriculture Productivity Enhancement Project (SIAPEP), funded by World Bank and launched in 2015-16, was going to be completed this year for Rs30.1bn — an ongoing project for which Rs968m were earmarked.

SIAPEP was launched at a cost of Rs18bn, however, inflationary pressure caused an escalation in its cost that shot from Rs18bn to Rs30bn in the current year. SWAT is another foreign-aided development project with an FY24 allocation of Rs4.9m. It has been launched in Sindh’s farm and irrigation sectors.

Solar panels would be provided for Rs244.6m out of a total cost of Rs999.3m to a high-efficiency network which had been availed by farmers under SIAPEP. Water storage tanks were built by growers to provide water to land through a drip irrigation system. This scheme remained unapproved in the FY23 budget with a revised allocation of Rs124.8m but zero releases.

The FY24 budget allocates Rs99m for a vertical farming scheme, of which Rs45.6m was reserved for the water management wing of the department. It remained unapproved in the last budget though it aims to enhance the productivity of vegetables, according to officials, especially in Karachi, which remains dependent on supplies from the rest of Sindh.

Subsidies in the form of seeds, material for tunnels, green net, and bed formation would be provided to growers for a two-acre plot. Vegetables would be grown in a controlled environment that has the potential to give better yields.

The research wing would be spending Rs25m out of an estimated cost of Rs100m for “vertical development of wheat through speed breeding” in the Hyderabad and Shaheed Benazirabad divisions.

An unapproved Rs2.8bn scheme of installation of “pulp processing units for fruits and vegetables in Sindh” was mentioned in this year’s budget with an allocation of Rs713m. An engineering department official said it was to be used mainly in tomato-producing areas for pulp processing.

Sindh Abadgar Board leader Mehmood Nawaz Shah complains the budgetary development proposals were not discussed with stakeholders. “We have been crying about how the research wing has been performing. It might be getting lower allocations, but outcomes of it should be shared,” he remarked.

He pointed out that amidst limited resources, the focus should be on the current agricultural practices that farmers have been following and concepts like vertical farming should be reserved for areas where fertile land is unavailable, unlike the countryside.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, June 26th, 2023