August 2, 2002	Friday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 22,1423

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ISLAMABAD, Aug 1: The education minister, Zobaida Jalal, has said she will make every effort to ensure that the National College of Arts (NCA) is granted university status.

Presiding over a meeting of the NCA’s board of governors (BOG) on Thursday, the minister said she would try her best to get through the idea of granting higher status to the NCA through cabinet approval. She said the government was supportive of the role being played by the educational institutions.

The minister said the NCA was the only art institution in the public sector which had earned international acclaim due to the quality of its educational standards.

The institution was playing a pivotal role in imparting fine arts education to the students of the country, she said, adding that the NCA also enjoyed the responsibility of keeping the culture of Pakistan alive, not only nationally, but also internationally.

It is noteworthy that the NCA continues to draw its students from a variety of educational and ethnic composition in the country, thereby meeting the challenges of maintaining the standard and quality of education, besides creating opportunities for national and social integration through broad-based art education.

The BoG members informed the minister that the NCA was initiating postgraduate programme in visual arts on Pakistan’s traditional areas, in addition to similar programmes in interior designing, multimedia arts, culture and communication studies.

She was also told that public-private partnership had been a cornerstone of the current expansion of the NCA into higher education and research, which was also evident from the fact that the department of musicology, first of its kind in Pakistan, was set up last year at the undergraduate level.

The minister was briefed about the largest collection of books and archival material on visual arts in the NCA library.

She expressed her satisfaction over the progress and working of NCA and said her ministry would extend every possible help to the institution in imparting knowledge about culture and tradition.

However, she asked the NCA administration to increase the number of students on the institution’s roll so that maximum number of youth could get acquainted with culture, values and traditions of the country.