LAHORE, May 17: A division bench of the Lahore High Court on Wednesday allowed the Punjab government to be impleaded as a party to a writ petition against the functioning of illegal universities and professional colleges and summoned education secretary on May 25 to answer certain questions.

The bench impleaded the Punjab government as a party after Deputy Attorney-General Pervez Ahmad Malik submitted that provincial governments were not responding to a number of requests made by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) for action against educational institutions that were functioning illegally and were extracting money from students without imparting quality education.

The Punjab government had, he submitted, a greater responsibility in the matter because the highest number of such institutions were operating in the province. The Punjab education secretariat had failed to respond to a number of letters written by the commission for corrective measures in education sector. He submitted that provincial governments and not the HEC were competent to take action.

He submitted that provincial governments had taken action only after President Gen Musharraf took notice of unlawful activities of the universities and colleges which were fleecing students in the name of professional education. He submitted that the president came hard on such institutions only last week and the provinces then called emergency meetings to proceed against such institutions.

He submitted that the HEC had worked out a policy of monitoring academic standards and other working of universities and professional colleges in the private sector with the objective of ensuring uniformity in imparting learning under syllabi which provided for quality education. The DAG referred to a statement of President Musharraf that illegal educational institutions should be closed down in three months and said this was precisely the HEC policy devised to achieve the standards of education which were compatible with the modern time and the world.

As the DAG concluded his submission, petitioner’s counsel Azam Nazir Tarar made a verbal request to the court that the Punjab government should be impleaded as a party because of its negligence of the vital sector of education. The court accepted the request.

Petitioner-lawyer Syed Hassam Qadir Hashmi alleged that the HEC had failed to ban around 118 universities and professional colleges across the Punjab which were operating without a lawful authority. The court earlier decided to proceed ex-parte against the institutions whose administrations had not responded to the court summons. The court served notices on all the 118 institutions and some of them were represented during Wednesday’s proceedings.

The petitioner submitted that 118 so-called universities and colleges were operating illegally in Punjab alone with the purpose of only extracting money from helpless students in the name of imparting education in all the fields of professional learning, including information technology, accounts, commerce, business administration, medicine, computer and law.

The counsel submitted that some of the institutions claimed to have charters of different foreign and national universities and some were saying that they had affiliations with such universities. They submitted that another category of the institutions was that they had no charter at all. Yet another category was that the institutions had no affiliation and the charter. They stated that all the institutions were working without a lawful authority. The common feature in all the universities and colleges was that they had secured no authorization from the HEC to function but they continued to play havoc in the name of higher education. They submitted that the HEC was obliged under Section 10 of the Higher Education Commission Ordinance, 2002, to bring higher education under a regulatory discipline but it failed to do so.

It transpired during Wednesday’s proceedings that most of the universities had no affiliation with a foreign and national university but were claiming they had in advertisement to the press. Similarly, some ‘universities’ were entitled to impart education up to higher secondary education and any education beyond that level was illegal. For example, a university claiming affiliation with a foreign university stated that it had applied for the foreign university’s charter which was yet to be obtained. To a question, the university stated it had the charter of a university from the NWFP and was functioning in Lahore only and it was operating no campuses in that province.