The civil and police administration of Barnala district is all geared up to act against paddy stubble burning. To ensure that no incidence of paddy stubble burning is reported in the district, the administration has gone into micro planning in the form of making village level whatsapp groups, providing adequate machinery for stubble management, having details of each and every farmer and taking other preventive steps.
Deputy Commissioner Barnala Mrs Punamdeep Kaur said while convening meeting of senior civil and police functionaries today. SSP Barnala Mr Sandeep Kumar Malik accompanied her. Deputy Commissioner said that 25 villages of the district, which has reported more than 30 incidences of fire last year have been identified as the hotspot villages.
As part of the micro planning, senior officers have been allocated these villages along with their police counterparts for joint monitoring of these villages to prevent fires. She directed the officers to ensure that whatsapp groups at village levels should be formed wherein all farmers of respective villages should be included.
This will not only ensure that they are made aware but also shall be helpful in detecting fire incidents at the earliest. "Officers should have details that of farmers along with their phone numbers, land they own and the dates when they would harvest their crops," she added.
She clarified that for these 25 villages, special sanction is being taken from the govenrment to extend date of providing farm machinery to individual farmers who had earlier not been able to get it. Each village's cooperative society is being given ten super seeder surface seeder each so that wheat can easily be sown in the paddy stubble.
The societies that do not have money are being provided machinery through the NGOs. Sub divisional magistrates have been directed to ensure that meetings are conducted with market committees and commission agents. She directed that farmers connected with these people should not put paddy stubble in fire and they should be made responsible for action of farmers.
ADC (G) Latif Ahmed, ADC (D) Satwant Singh, SDM Barnala Gurbir Singh Sodhi, SDM Tapa Dr Poonampreet Kaur, Chief Agriculture Officer Dr Jagdish Singh, police officers and other officers were present.