LAHORE: A major controversy has emerged over the methodology used by the Crop Reporting Centre (CRC) Punjab in determining provincial cotton output, with serious allegations of inflated and misleading statistics surfacing.

It has been revealed that CRC Punjab is allegedly estimating total cotton production using hypothetical calculations — extrapolating yields based on the number of bolls per plant across an acre or, in some districts, from small sample plots as small as eight feet by six feet.

This has exposed a long-standing discrepancy between the figures reported by CRC Punjab and those of the Pakistan Cotton Ginners Association (PCGA), with the former consistently reporting significantly higher production.

Ihsan-ul-Haq,........

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