ISLAMABAD, Jan 25: Education Minister Javed Ashraf Qazi has banned foreign trips of the ministry's officials, a well-placed source at the ministry told Dawn.

"Now onwards, no ministry official will be allowed to go on a foreign trip, as increasingly witnessed in the past with virtually no check on the practice," the education minister was quoted as saying.

Earlier, the source said, a major chunk of funding coming to the ministry was utilized on foreign trips of senior ministry officials. Likewise, a good amount of money was spent on buying vehicles and other such logistics, while spending on actual projects remained very low.

In response to a question, the source said the provisions of foreign trips were deliberately created by the officials, especially in the projects run by foreign funding.

Hence, whenever there was a new project to be carried out with the help of foreign donations, it was understood that the head of a certain wing of the ministry would visit some country.

Only recently, a proposal came to the minister to allow the federal and the provincial education secretaries to visit Melbourne University under the Science Education Project-II (SEP- II). However, the minister did not endorse the idea and banned all such trips in future.

The project is being funded by the Asian Development Bank for promotion of teaching standards in the country. The minister was also quoted as saying that the money that would be wasted on the trip would now be used to invite master trainers from Australia to train teachers in mathematics, computer and general science disciplines.

In this regard, the ministry had already set up a monitoring cell that would oversee whether or not the funding was being effectively utilized.