July 03, 2007	Tuesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 17, 1428

ABBOTTABAD, July 2: Dr Ishrat Hussain, former governor of State Bank and adviser to the prime minister, has said the country is facing a shortage of good economists. He said this at the launching ceremony of the BS (economics) programme of the Comsats Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad Campus, on Monday.

Quoting examples, Dr Hussain said the SBP required at least 30 good economists on a yearly basis. But for the last so many years only 14 or 15 appeared to be top notch out of hundreds of applicants.

Dr Hussain — who is also the chairman of the Higher Education Commission’s National Committee on Development of Social Sciences and Humanities — said the ministry of information and technology would be asked to establish by 2010 a “Technology Park” on the Comsats campus in Abbottabad.

He said the government had increased the budget of the Higher Education Commission to Rs28 billion from only Rs8 million not so long ago.

Regarding the development of the IT sector, Dr Hussain said the government had focused its attention on the Hazara division, for the northern areas of the NWFP, and Dera Ismail Khan, for its southern regions. This would ease the pressure on Peshawar and other big cities as the government wanted to provide training facilities to all the areas.

Dr Hussain was of the view that the country’s ‘talent pool’ needed to be expanded, particularly because the country required a knowledge-based economy.

He said in the past social sciences were among the most neglected sectors. As a result, the country lacked behind other nations vis-a-vis production of “skilful minds”.

Earlier, the rector of Comsats, Dr Junaid Zaidi, said that his institution had formulated the Vision 2020 under which the number of departments would be increased from eight to 23, the programmes from 19 to 62, the students from 3,163 to 5,816, the faculty members from 227 to 291 and computer laboratories from 34 to 88.