SWABI, June 7: President Gen Pervez Musharraf has said that the government is giving priority to education and has made an unprecedentedly large allocation for the sector.

Speaking at the 10th convocation of the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology on Wednesday, he stressed the need for cementing link between human resource development and economic progress and outlined his vision for achieving the desired goals in the economic sector.

Gen Musharraf, who is also chancellor of the GIK Institute, said: “We have to do a lot of work to produce highly qualified manpower, for which we will have to seek assistance from foreign countries.”

He said the higher education budget had been enhanced from Rs600 million to Rs22 billion. He hoped that the Higher Education Commission would fulfil its obligations.

Referring to the situation in the region, he said that developments taking place in Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Iran, Iraq and Gulf would not hamper the country’s pace of economic growth. “We are not faced with any external threat, the threat is from within the country in the shape of extremism and terrorism. We are not scared of these happenings.”

Emphasising the need for promoting knowledge-based economy, Gen Musharraf said: “We need to enhance productive capacity of the economy by fully utilising the natural and human resources.”

He said nine science and technology universities, being set up in the country with the assistance of Italy, South Korea, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria and Japan, would become functional by 2008.

These countries will have links with local industries which would help attract investment and produce skilled manpower.

He said since technical education system of Pakistan was outdated, the government had decided to establish vocational and technical education centres of high standard.

The president announced that the government would undertake the external debt liability of the GIK Institute for next four years.

Later, the president gave away gold medals and degrees to 196 BS graduates, 40 MS graduates and five PhDs.

The PhD degrees were awarded to Sirajul Islam, Asifullah Khan, Abdul Majid, Hassan Fawad Junejo and Muhammad Siddique. Sana Arif and Bilal Raiz bagged the Ghulam Ishaq Khan medal and the Quaid-i-Azam medal, respectively.