By Our Correspondent
Kaski, Jan. 30: Pokhara Metropolitan City has started distributing identity cards to the farmers since Friday. Addressing the card distribution programme, Minister for Land Management, Agriculture and Cooperatives of Gandaki Province Lekh Bahadur Thapa urged the farmers to focus on commercial production as the present time was of commercial agriculture.
Minister Thapa asked THE farmers to focus on professionalism and said development was impossible only through subsistence farming.
He said that the province government was ready to provide all necessary support to the farmers to use modern technologies in farming.
He said that a few workers could do a lot of work after adopting the modern technology and equipment, and the production cost would also drop.
Admitting that the government has not been able to do as much as it should for the farmers, he said that he would help the farmers by looking at their works.
He also said that the distribution of identity cards started by Pokhara should be expanded across the country.
Mayor of Pokhara Metropolitan City Man Bahadur GC said that the identity card would help in removing the duplication in grants and assistance distributed to the farmers.
He said that the farmers had to face many problems in absence of identity cards and now the identity cards were issued to solve the problems.
He also said that the metropolis would help the farmers become commercial.
Narayan Sharma, chief of the National Livestock Management Centre, Pokhara, said that the distribution of identity cards to the farmers was delayed.
He also said that the tendency of non-farmers taking benefit from the support provided to the farmers would end with the issuance of the identity cards.
The programme was started by distributing identity cards to Tej Bahadur Bhattarai of Pokhara-7.
According to Nawaraj Adhikari, chief of the livestock branch of the metropolis, identity cards would be distributed to 288 farmers in the first phase and other farmers would gradually get it.
The identity cards were distributed by dividing the farmers in six categories, said the officials.