By IANS,
Chandigarh : Two agriculture officers of Punjab were Friday suspended by the state agriculture minister because they not only failed to run the plough through the sown paddy area and destroy the seedlings but submitted fake photographs to claim completion of the operation.
Sowing the paddy before June 10 has been banned in Punjab as the crop requires heavy irrigation and makes demand on ground water, whose levels have been constantly going down in the state.
According to government sources, agriculture officers Surjit Singh and Inderjit Singh, both posted at Jalandhar, were suspended after they submitted to their authorities the fake photographs of a ploughed field of a farmer in Cheema village near Jalandhar. It is mandatory for the agriculture officers to submit photographs of ploughed fields to show destroyed paddy seedlings if these were sowed before June 10.
The officers, in fact, ploughed only one part of the 10-acre farm of the agriculturist and his entire field, where paddy was sown in violation of the state ban, was spared of being ploughed and photographed.
The officers even had the false news published of the “action” they had taken against farmer Rattan Singh.
But when Punjab’s chief agriculture officer visited the same fields, he found the paddy crop standing and saw that the fields had not been ploughed at all.
Both officers were suspended.