A former chairman of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) has warned that the devolution of the commission will be a monumental disaster, fearing that the government’s decision will pose a danger to the existence of the country as it strikes at the very fabric of a single and united Pakistan.
Addressing an emotionally charged press conference at a local hotel here on Friday, Prof Dr Atta ur Rahman appealed to the president and the prime minister to urgently intervene before further damage was done.
He stated that before going public on the issue he had consulted top scientists and academicians, who were of the unanimous opinion that the commission’s devolution would lead to a collapse of the higher education sector, which had made remarkable progress during the last eight years.
Rahman termed the step to devolve the HEC unconstitutional, saying that the 18th Amendment through the 4th schedule (Article 70.4, Federal Legislative List, Parts 1 and 2) fully protected the higher education sector, which was a federal regulatory authority and autonomous body reporting directly to the prime minister. It was not a department or division of the Ministry of Education and had no legal connection with the Ministry of Education, he remarked.
The former HEC chairman reminded the audience that in most federations around the world, higher education was a federal subject (India has UGC with a federal secretary of higher education; the UK has a minister for universities and research; Malaysia, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan and China, all treat higher education as a federal subject; and in Korea they had given the status of deputy prime minister to their minister of higher education).
He pointed out that the devolution decision was also in defiance of the Supreme Court ruling regarding the verification of the degrees of parliamentarians by the HEC. After devolution, the HEC would no longer be able to fulfil the orders of the Supreme Court, he said, adding that it was understood that a new organisation (Commission for Standards of Higher Education) was being created under the Cabinet Division for the verification of degrees.
“This will mean that degree verification will now not be carried out by an independent autonomous body such as the HEC, but by an organisation working directly under the Cabinet Division.
This represents a direct confrontation with the Supreme Court of Pakistan and amounts to contempt of court.”
Rahman recalled that all the 72 vice chancellors of Pakistan’s public sector universities had unanimously resolved in November 2010 that the HEC must continue to function.
He mentioned that the World Bank had agreed to provide $300 million to the HEC provided its legal status was not changed. Another $250 million was to be provided by USAID, but both these commitments amounting to about Rs50 billion had now have been put on hold and were likely to be withdrawn with the dissolution of the HEC, he said.
The HEC model had been very successful over the last nine years and maintained its credibility, specifically in the context of the degree verification issue, but now it was being punished in the name of devolution under the 18th Amendment, Rahman said.
He remarked that the HEC had accomplished more in eight years since its establishment in 2002 than was achieved in the first 55 years of Pakistan’s existence. Agriculture, bio-technology and engineering had been the fields in which there had been the greatest impact, he noted.
Quoting statistics, he told the media that more than 800 PhD scholarships in agriculture had been awarded by the HEC and more PhDs had graduated from Pakistani universities in the past nine years than in the first 55 years of the country’s existence.
According to the former HEC chairman, in engineering a ten-fold growth has been witnessed; research output (as measured by published papers) has grown six-fold since 2002 (from 815 in 2002 to 5068 in 2010); two Pakistani universities are now ranked among the top 300 science and technology institutions of the world; enrolment in higher education institutions has grown from 300,000 to 900,000 in the past eight years; and 20 new public universities have been established in the past nine years.
He further noted that the HEC had set up the Pakistan Education and Research Network, one of the most sophisticated computer networks in the world linking all universities; video-conferencing equipment was operational in 74 institutions and expanding rapidly; and a digital library provided access to 75 percent of the world’s technical literature (23,000 journals and 45,000 e-books), which “are essential for research and “cannot be devolved”.
0 comments:
Post a Comment