April 29, 2006	Saturday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 30, 1427

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LAHORE, April 28: A division bench of the Lahore High Court on Friday allowed the Higher Education Commission time to file a reply to a writ petition contending that the commission had failed to ban 118 universities and colleges in Punjab which it had declared illegal.

The HEC had claimed that these institutions were operating on the pretext of imparting quality education in all professional disciplines, though they were already declared illegal.

Comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Husain Chaudhry and Justice Muhammad Bilal Khan, the LHC bench also issued directions to the registrar office to ensure that notices were properly served on some 58 institutions which were not represented in the day’s proceedings. The counsel for the remaining 60 institutions, which had been issued notices, were present in court.

On the last day of hearing of the petition on April 12, the court issued notices to 123 respondents, one of them being the federal government.

The court adjourned till May 12 further proceedings in the writ petition through which Advocate Syed Hassam Qadir submitted that 118 so-called universities and colleges were operating illegally only to extract money from students in the name of imparting education.

His counsel Azam Nazir Tarar submitted that some of these institutions claimed that they had the charter of different foreign and national universities and some others were saying they had affiliation with such universities.

He submitted that other categories of the institutions were those which had neither affiliation nor charter.

The counsel submitted that the HEC was under a national and legal obligation to enforce a proper academic discipline with periodic inquiry into the institutions of higher education as stipulated under section 10 of the Higher Education Commission Ordinance of

2002. But, he submitted, the HEC was taking no remedial measures against the mushroom growth of the illegal institutions.

According to the petition, 22 of the institutions blacklisted by the HEC with the instructions that they were not authorised to offer fresh admissions to students after April 2005, had started the admissions for 2006 throughout the Punjab and the HEC had yet to take notice of the activity.

The court, however, did not accede to the counsel’s request that the institutions should be stopped from offering admissions. The court observed that such a request was part of the prayer and would be decided along with it.

The court also did not agree with advocates Hafiz Abdur Rehman Ansari and Ali Sibtain Fazli, representing some of the institutions, who pleaded that the institutions should be classified in different categories of professional education and dealt with separately.

The court observed that a matter of vital national importance could not be diluted on technical grounds.