Secy’s move for fertiliser price hike irks PM

Prime minister Sheikh Hasina on Monday expressed her annoyance at the industries ministry move for increasing fertiliser prices as that would hit hard farmers across the country. 
Presiding over the weekly cabinet meeting at the Cabinet Division, she said that a secretary of the government could not initiate such a move on a sensitive matter keeping his minister in the dark, said ministers.
Agriculture minister Matia Chowhdury picked up the issue for discussion as industries secretary Md Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan sent a letter to her ministry’s secretary to discuss the price hike of fertiliser, particularly urea, two cabinet members confirmed. 
‘Farmers made supreme sacrifice in movements against fertiliser price hikes in the past...We will continue to give subsidies to ensure supply of fertiliser at low costs to farmers,’ a senior minister quoted Hasina as saying. 
Asked for comment, agriculture secretary Mohammad Moinuddin Abdullah said that the government had no pan to increase the prices of fertiliser at the moment. 
He said that urea, a major agricultural input subsidised by the government, was now retailing at Tk 17-18 a kilogram. 
The government in 2015-16 provided Tk 2,337.28 crore in subsidies for the imports and productions of fertilisers, according to the secretary. 
He said that the state-run factories produced about 10 lakh tonnes of urea while 15 lakh tonnes were imported annually. 
During an informal discussion, Hasina called upon her colleagues concerned to work together so that the pro-Awami League lawyers’ panel could win the upcoming election to the Supreme Court Bar Association. 
Pointing at food minister Qamrul Islam, also a lawyer by profession, the prime minister said that the panel backed by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Jamaat-e-Islami swept the Dhaka Bar Association polls in February because of internal conflict of the pro-Awami League panel. 
The cabinet approved in principle the draft Standards of Weights and Measures Bill 2017, proposing to toughen punishments for offences under the proposed law.
The government had taken the move to upgrade the existing weight and measurement system to the international standards by updating the Standards of Weights and Measures Ordinance 1982, cabinet secretary Mohammad Shafiul Alam said at a briefing after the meeting. 
He said that anyone found involved in tempering standards of the weights and measures would be jailed for two years and fined Tk 50,000 under the proposed law. The fine was Tk 5,000 in the existing law. 
‘One will be punished with maximum six months’ imprisonment and fine of Tk 20,000 for using tempered scales,’ the cabinet secretary said, adding that only the penalty had been increased from Tk 3,000 here.
The cabinet also endorsed the draft Bangladesh Industrial Institutions Nationalisation Bill 2017, which was just an updated Bangla version of the similar law enacted in 1972.

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