{"book":"adl0980","page":8,"text":"Foreword\n\nKEEPING pace with rapid progress the world over, Afghanistan has been taking great strides forward since the Five Year Plan began its first year in September, 1956.\nThis Plan is neither ambitious nor modest. It was prepared simply to meet the most important requirements of the country with the minimum cost and maximum utility. The story of the implementation of the first three years of the Plan has been reported by the Afghan Information Bureau in three similar publications at the end of each year.\nThe aim of the present publication is to describe the implementation of the Plan in its fourth year, as it has been reported by various Government and other agencies responsible for its execution.\nEvery effort has been made to summarize the material and present the different phases of the Plan in a precise form. In a few cases, however, the report covers only the first half of the fourth year because it was felt that facts and figures should not be rushed at the expense of accuracy.\nThe Information Bureau,\nRoyal Afghan Embassy,\n1, Kensington Church Court,\nLondon, W.8.\n\nOUTLINE OF THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN\n\nTHE Ministry of Planning, established in 1957 by Act of Parliament, is directly responsible for the co-ordination of all projects carried out by the various other Ministries in connection with the Five Year Plan.\nThe main emphasis, however, has been placed on agriculture. The Plan in this case is based on the principle that both equipment and knowledge should be made available to the farmers, so that they can increase their output per jirib (half-acre), and per individual beast.\nResearch stations will be established to study the problems arising, and these will conduct campaigns against animal and plant pestilences and diseases. Agricultural mechanisation will also be under-taken, especially in the northern and south-western provinces.\nFarming schools will be set up, in addition to the present High Schools and Faculty of Agriculture, and there will be seasonal courses in the farms and villages for the further training of personnel.\nAll this is to be carried out because Afghanistan is a predominantly agricul-tural country, the main means of live-lihood being farming and the tending of livestock. With the current conditions receiving proper attention, it is expected that farm output will not only suffice for the internal needs of the country, but that it will be possible to export more products such as cotton and wool, to the advantage of the people.\nNew dams will be constructed on the following rivers: Kunduz in Kataghan, Kokcha in Kataghan, Sardeh in Ghazni, Paltu in Katawaz, Kharwar and Machal-ghu in Kabul Province.\nA new canal will carry water from the Kabul River near Jalalabad, to irrigate a vast tract of land south and east of the city.\nBy these measures it is hoped to increase the arable land in Afghanistan by 625,000 acres.\nForestry plans in various districts will ensure better climatic conditions, prevent erosion and floods, and produce more timber.\n\n5","chars":3013,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0980/00008.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":93,"title":"Afghan progress in the fourth year plan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0980/8","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0980/canvas/8","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0980/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0980_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}