M A I N   N E W S

Punjab to export wheat to Dubai
Tribune News Service and PTI

Malout, March 11
Punjab has signed a contract with Dubai and Sri Lanka under which the border state will export wheat and potato to these countries.

Announcing this here today, the Punjab Chief Minister, Mr Parkash Singh Badal, said that the state government would export four lakh tonnes each of wheat and potato to these countries to stabilise the commodities’ market in Punjab.

Inaugurating a Rs 30 crore sugar mill at Malout in Muktsar district, the Chief Minister said that the production of sugarcane would be raised from 305 lakh quintal to 350 lakh quintal in the current year.

“Punjab is the only state which is providing maximum price of Rs 110 per quintal of sugarcane in the country,” he claimed.

He called upon farmers to diversify from the traditional wheat and paddy crops plantation to sugarcane.

He said that inter-state issues relating to Punjab and Haryana had become knotty and difficult to solve. He alleged that it was the previous Congress government at the Centre and in Punjab and Haryana which had made the inter-state issues knotty.

“The Congress party had made the disputes relating to river waters and transfer of Punjabi-speaking areas and Chandigarh to Punjab ‘pechida’ (complicated) and now the same party had been raising the issue that the Punjab Government was not solving these matters”, he said, adding that four years were too less to solve such issues.

He alleged that it was also the Congress Government at the Centre which signed the WTO treaty and sounded the death-knell for the farming community. He claimed that the Punjab Government was trying to pressurise the present Central Government to impose dumping duties on various items so that interests of local farmers could be protected.

He pointed out that the WTO would prove fatal for Indian agriculture and his party would make every effort to save farmers from it.