MITHI:The high-ups of Sindh government taking notice of the wheat flour crisis in the desert district for past many weeks due to intra-district movement of the wheat grain on Wednesday allowed the local concerned functionaries to purchase the grains.
According to the notification issued to the district food department in Mithi, the officials were directed on the orders of provincial food minister to procure and purchase wheat from Badin, Thatta and Sujawal districts and ensure the same to millers across the district, who were already protesting against the unavailability of the food grains. According the directive, the millers had been allowed to purchase the wheat.
Dileep Kumar, Kishwar Kumar, Ashok Lohana and other leaders of Tharparkar Flour Mills Association speaking to the local journalists expressed their anger and indignation over the alleged indifferent attitude towards their frequent appeals to provide with required quantity of wheat from their traditional areas in Mirpurkhas, Umerkot, Sanghar and other districts at the time of the harvesting of the crop.
They claimed that Badin, Sujawal and Thatta districts had never been the wheat cultivation districts and this year again the produce of those districts would never cater to the need of the millers to ensure the flour to the consumers of the entire desert district in the coming months.
They termed the fresh directive of the officials as the cruel joke with millers and Tharis, who totally depended on the produce from other districts since the desert district did not produce any traditional food grains to meet their food needs.
The millers told that many of them had already privately purchased the food grains in Sanghar, Mirpurkhas and other districts but were not being allowed to shift their pucrased and procured food stocks to their mills in their respective towns and villages of the desert region adding they warned to resume their protest of closing down their mills if the prudent measures were not made by the high-ups of Sindh government.