Anisul Islam Noor :
The cost of boro production is likely to increase this season as about four lakh irrigation pumps did not get electricity connection despite fulfilling the desired condition set for power connection, sources said.
As a result, irrigation cost of diesel run pumps jumped from Tk 4,500 to 5,400 per acre while the electricity-run pumps charge Tk 3,000 to 3,600, according to Directorate of Agriculture Extension data.
The statistics showed that at least 12.6 lakh irrigation pumps out of 16.5 lakh run on diesel which costs 50 per cent more than the pumps running on electricity. Diesel-run pumps raise overall cost of boro cropping by at least 5 per cent.
The concerned authorities did not extend power connections on a large scale for irrigation pumps mainly because of shortage of power supply and lack of distribution facilities, said a power division official.
He added overload in power distribution network would now affect the farmers forcing them to run their irrigation pumps for the boro cropping in 2017 on expensive diesel.
‘This year, we had decided to provide all applicants with power connection from available power distribution lines for boro irrigation excepting the overloaded lines,’ Rural Electrification Board Chairman Moin Uddin told reporters on Sunday.
Officials of Rural Electrification Board said providing of new power connections at a much higher rate than that of increasing distribution capacities has mainly raised overload in distribution networks.
The board has provided two to three lakh new power connections per month during the last two years while it had provided only 3.30 lakh connections for irrigation pumps since its inception in 1978, they said.
‘It is the government who gives priority to households to provide with the new power connections in the rural areas keeping the demand for irrigation ignored,’ said Consumers Association of Bangladesh energy adviser M Shamsul Alam, also an electrical engineering professor.
Farm economist Golam Hafiz Kennedy, also a professor at agriculture business department of Bangladesh Agricultural University, said the government and the authorities concerned should explore every possible way to minimise the cost of cropping, particularly the crop like Boro.
Traditional negligence in giving priority to the different factors of cropping would pose a serious threat to the food security in the long run, he said. He suggested expediting power connections to the irrigation pumps.
According to a government estimate, about 3.5 crore tonne rice was produced in the country in 2016 irrigation season and 1.9 crore tonnes of the rice was produced in boro season.
Some 3.3 lakh irrigation pumps, approximately 20 per cent of the total pumps, got power supplies from the Rural Electrification Board, according to the official data provided by the power division.
