KARACHI, Oct 14: The Sindh government is contemplating involvement of the private sector in managerial and academic affairs of the Government College of Commerce and Economics.

Sources in the Education Department said that some senior officials of the department had recently facilitated a trip of some businessmen and industrialists to the college for the purpose, under the directives of their supervisors. The group, including some old boys of the college, had approached the competent authority for getting permission to take over the college, the sources added.

The college, established in 1945, is one of the three colleges, which had been taken over by the government after the inception of Pakistan. The college, with over 2000 students on its roll for intermediate and degree level education, is located at an ideal site on Dr Ziauddin Ahmed Road and has been one of the prestigious commerce colleges run by the government.

Since the visit of the businessmen’s group, the teachers and students have been very much concerned over the future of the college. A teacher said that the visitors had claimed that they had already convinced the governor for taking over the college.

Keen observers, however, did not see any wisdom in the proposal for handing over the college to the private sector. They said that the college was never nationalized by the government and as such it could not be denationalised or transferred to the private sector. On the other hand, the college is very much sound academically, administratively and financially and there was no room for constituting any board of governors for the college.

One senior official of the education department said that a board of governors was formed, normally, when the college or school was failing to deliver the goods academically or any managerial chaos prevailed there. At present, there is no government college in the city where any BOG existed, the official said and expressed the view that the government should maintain the present status of the college in order to keep it as a role model for other government colleges.

A senior teacher at the institution maintained that the faculty members as well as the non-teaching staff were very regular, hard-working and had always been appreciated by the education secretary during his surprise visits. The college is ‘best of the bests’ commerce college of the province and has always achieved surpassing results throughout the five decades of its functioning, the teacher claimed, adding that the college had bagged all the first four top positions at the university examinations and third top position in intermediate examinations of the Karachi board.

It was learnt that taking exception to the visit of the businessmen as well as some of its alumni, the senior teachers of the college had requested the Sindh governor to intervene in the matter and rescue the college from commercialisation. The teachers maintained that they must be given an audience by the governor before taking any decision on the fate of the college, said sources in the college.

A couple of years back, the Sindh Education Department had disapproved the request for handing over the college to the private sectors, the source maintained.