KARACHI: “Pakistan needs a face to be proud of. Let’s face it, we haven’t picked up the speed we should have to lift the standards of higher education here,” said Sindh Senior Minister for Education and Information Nisar Khuhro at the national seminar on ‘Higher education in Pakistan: the way forward’ organised by the Sindh Madressatul Islam University (SMIU) at a local hotel here on Friday.

“For a while, earlier, we only had public sector universities. The issue then was to get more people into the higher education system for which we started looking towards the private sector. We made a law that private universities could be established. Now we have expanded in quantity but for quality we need inspection and evaluation committees. The universities need constant checks on what kind of education and environment they are providing to their students. Faculties, too, need to be developed. The more qualified they are the better the opportunity for students to learn,” the minister added.

“Still,” he said, “fifty or so universities here are not enough for Sindh’s population. Save one or two, I have not seen more than one campus of public or private universities. Ideally, a university should have one campus in an urban area and another in a rural area. Distance learning is also one way to open your hearts and minds to learning. So there should be more virtual universities, too,” he said while adding that another aspect which they needed to give serious thought to was good research as universities also need to produce knowledge.

Sindh Minister for Culture and Tourism Sharmila Farooqi said that since Pakistan didn’t have very good standard of universities those who could afford higher education or those who could get scholarships go abroad and after completing their education stay there while creating the brain drain here. “Therefore we need scholarships, endowment funds and world-class universities that are also made affordable as well as accessible to all students. We need to develop the provincial HECs, too. The federal and provincial governments need to strengthen universities as they cannot generate all their funds all the time,” she said.

“Teachers and professors have a great responsibility to their students. They have the power to mould young minds so it is also very important for them to also keep updating their own knowledge as to how to impart education in new and innovative ways,” she added.

Historian and former education minister Dr Hamida Khuhro, chairing a session on ‘Promotion of quality education at the university level in Pakistan’, said for producing quality research original sources should be looked at.

“I have had people come to me telling me they are interested in doing a PhD in Islamic history but they don’t know any Arabic or Persian. Then I persuaded them to do local research. In humanities, you need anthropological research. It’s important if you want to preserve societies. You can also do research on climate change. Basically, we need researchers to research our problems by doing fieldwork. So far we have needed foreign scholars to even analyse politics. Building up libraries and publishing quality journals is the way forward,” she pointed out.

Shahnaz Wazir Ali, acting president of the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto University of Science and Technology, chairing a session on ‘Improving the teaching and learning environment’ said that teaching was more important than concentrating on infrastructures. “If one focuses more on the infrastructure and not teaching at a university, the university suffers. The quality component depends on your faculty quality and the stream of students,” she said.

Consul General of Russia Mr Oleg N. Avdeev offered the SMIU to send a batch of its students to study for a few months to Russia. “These exchanges could be very fruitful as we have space research and technology. They can benefit from it,” he said.

Ms Rita Akhtar, executive director, United States Education Foundation, Islamabad, said that during the current year, Karachi had got more Fulbright Scholarships. She said that in the year of 2005 there were just 10 to 20 students in Pakistan who had availed the scholarships, but now the number had been increased.

Mr Lars Bergmeyer, director, DAAD Information Centre, Islamabad, informed that research in universities was very important for economic development. He said that there were many scholarship holders of Pakistan, who got education and training from Germany and were now serving their own country Pakistan.

Earlier, in his welcome address, SMIU vice chancellor Dr Mohammed Ali Shaikh said that public as well as private-sector universities had their own sets of issues such as outdated curriculum, politics, etc, for the former and not enough departments especially in the sciences while becoming profit-making machines for the latter.

Dr Javed Ashraf, VC, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad; Prof Dr Mohammad Aslam Uqaili, VC, Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Jamshoro; Dr Zahoor Ahmad Swati, VC, University of Agriculture, Peshawar; Prof Dr Javed Iqbal, VC, University of Balochistan, Quetta; Professor Dr Dost Mohammed Baloch, VC, Lasbela University of Agriculture, Lasbela; Dr Akhtar Baloch, VC, Benazir Bhutto Shaheed University Lyari, Karachi; Prof Nisar Ahmed Siddiqui, director, Institute of Business Administration, Sukkur; Prof Mohammad Rais Alvi, director, KASBIT; Prof Dr Mohammed Haleem Khan, VC, Women University of AJK; Prof Dr Shahida Hasnain, VC, Women University, Multan; Dr Mohammed Memon, chairman, Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, Hyderabad; Dr Iqbal Panhwar, dean, Bahria University; Dr Sikandar Ali Mandhro, minister for parliamentary affairs, environment and cooperation, Sindh; Mr Shah Jehan Khan, coordinator to the chief minister, Sindh and Fazlullah Pechuho, secretary of education and literacy, government of Sindh also spoke.

Published in Dawn, October 17th , 2015

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