PUNJAB has embarked on one of its most consequential agrarian reforms in decades, transferring long-term cultivation rights over government-owned farmland to 30,000 landless families under the Apna Khet Apna Rozgar programme. More than a simple land handout, the scheme aims to shift thousands of rural households from dependence on daily wage labour toward asset-based livelihoods while bringing idle state land under productive cultivation.

Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz launched the distribution through a computerized digital balloting process, under which successful applicants were granted leasehold rights to cultivable government land for 20 years at a symbolic annual lease of Rs100 per acre. The scheme covers nearly 121,000 acres, making it one of the largest government-backed land access programmes in Punjab in recent years.

The initiative addresses a longstanding structural problem: despite agriculture’s........

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