‘If we decide that for the next 50 years we will focus on primary education alone, and then talk about higher education, we will never have higher education. We have to strike a balance,’ says Atta-ur-Rehman

DR Atta-ur-Rehman, who heads the government’s Higher Education Commission, and is the coordinator of the OIC Committee on Science and Technology, says the late start made by President Pervez Musharraf’s government to take Pakistan ahead in science and technology must be sustained by future governments.

In a panel interview, he calls for a bipartisan approach to the subject in which the government should take along opposition parties so the promotion of science and technology is not disrupted with the change of administrations.

Dr Rehman, who was science and technology minister in President Musharraf’s cabinet and continues to have a minister’s status, said the country also needed to carry out very focused programmes in different fields.

The following are excerpts from the interview:
 

Q: There is a general feeling that when we don’t even have any real primary education, how can we expect to have quality university education. What do you think of it?

A: You have to have a multi-pronged approach. If we decide that for the next 50 years we will focus on primary education and then only will we talk about higher education, then we will never have higher education. You have to have a balanced approach, because you have to have development everywhere. You have limited amount of funds for development. Sri Lanka has got over 90 per cent literacy, but it is not a developed country. So, development doesn’t work through literacy alone.

You have to have, actually, a number of factors dovetailing together where you have basic education, you have higher education, you have applied research and development, and, perhaps, most important of all is to have linkage with the market.

Through venture capital schemes, major investments, a strong marketing system, irresistible incentives to the private sector to come in, offering free land or long-term tax holidays and so on, your products and processes get translated into something which actually comes out into the market. All these have to come together before you have economic development taking place.
 

Q: There is this debate going on about the conflicting demands on our limited resources between lowering the illiteracy rate and the development of higher education. How do we resolve this conflict?

A: Again, there has to be a balanced approach. You can’t really say that one is more important than the other. There are norms of success and there are norms of failure. You only have to pick up a country like South Korea or Japan or any of these countries that have prospered, and see what kind of investment they have made in various sectors, including science and technology.

For instance, Unesco now recommends that a minimum of two per cent of GNP should go into science and technology in the developing world, whereas all OIC countries together spend only about 0.2 per cent on average of their GNP on science and technology and research and development. OIC’s Arab countries spend seven per cent of their budget on defence, in contrast.

The critical role R&D now plays in development has not been realized by the Islamic world, and Pakistan was no different till lately. The entire GDP of the Islamic world is less than half that of Germany and less than one quarter of Japan’s. There are only 500 universities in the entire Islamic world, most of them being colleges at best, whereas there are over thousand universities in Japan, and over 120 in Tokyo alone.
 

Q: But they have an initial comparative advantage in R&D. What are we doing to catch up?

A: We can’t spread money too thin. What we decided was that we should pick up a few selected fields in Applied Sciences — information technology, biotechnology, engineering and pharmacology — and a few in the Basic Sciences — physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology — and focus on them. Now, under the Higher Education Commission, social sciences are also being focused on.
 

Q: How different is the government approach to science and technology in the past and now?

A: Funding for science was never available in the past. Different committees used to be formed, different projects used to be formulated, but then they used to be put aside and never funded. Under Nawaz Sharif’s government, I was chairing the national committee which prepared the ninth five-year plan.

We had a document about what needed to be done, but no funds were made available. So when I took over as minister of science and technology in March 2000, the total budget for our ministry was Rs120 million. I told the president that if he wanted something to be done, and if he was serious about funding science, then it should be reflected in the budget as well. He was very kind and supportive, and as a result the budget today is about Rs7.1 billion.

But, then, money is only one part. You have to actually come forward with focused programmes, develop the manpower, link them with economic development, and so it is a whole series of things.

We have taken a very late start, but it has to be sustained.
 

Q: Why is our higher education sector in the state that it is in?

A: In the first five-year plan in the 1950s, we found that about 31 per cent of the total education budget used to go to higher education. This over the years eroded to a point that now only 10 per cent of the education budget was going into the higher education sector. And this meant that the universities got less and less funding, and so they in reality became high schools or ‘O’ level colleges. And most of the universities in Pakistan are, in fact, no better than colleges in terms of international standards.

Today, the situation is that even universities in Bangladesh have funding which is at least three-fold higher on average than in Pakistan. We now compare with sub-Saharan Africa in terms of funding. India has budgets in which universities have funding five to 10 times higher.

You can give 10 times as much funds as you have given to universities in the past, and they can absorb them easily because most of our universities lie in a totally dilapidated state. Out of the 7,000 faculty members that we have today, only about 1,550 have Ph.D. degrees. In India you cannot become an assistant professor in a college, let alone a university, unless you have a Ph.D. degree.

Another problem with most of the universities in Pakistan was that the vice-chancellors decided to do away with Bachelor’s classes to make life easier — fewer student problems, basically — with the result that except for two universities in Pakistan, the rest of them do not have a B.Sc. Hons. programme. They only have an M.Sc. programme.
 

Q: How supportive financially has the new government been to higher education?

A: There has been a directive from President Pervez Musharraf that the universities’ budget shall be doubled over the next three years, with a 50 per cent increase in the coming financial year, and another 50 per cent in the subsequent year. This is the kind of thing we need to move forward.
 

Q: What are the major plans being made to take Pakistan ahead in the field?

A: A major programme is being launched so that in about eight years from now, 50 per cent of our faculty members should have a doctorate degree. But then again, people come back into a barren environment and they get frustrated and move away. So one should have sustainable support for these people. We have come up with a programme that will assist them on their return.

The second is infrastructure, which means that the working environment has to be improved, and that means laboratories, libraries and sustainability of the entire thing. Because you have these expensive toys coming in and then people do not have the ability to maintain them. They get out of order and then you go ahead and buy more toys. There is no need for that. One has to really make sure that they have the necessary infrastructure in terms of stable electricity supply, UPS systems, electronic engineers, maintenance facilities, technicians and so on.

The third area is international linkages, because there is a lot of talent across the world that we can tap into. We have come forward with a programme called POCR — Pakistan Organization for Collaboration in Research — in which a professor abroad — he may be a Pakistani or another nationality — comes in for three or four weeks, writes up a detailed project with a partner institution in Pakistan, identifying an area for collaboration. This project can be for about $700,000 (about Rs40 million) for a four-year programme initially, so that there may be a long-term sustainable linkage with the exchange of faculty, training and so on. This could be in any of the priority areas, including the social sciences.

The fourth is the use of technology, which has suddenly opened a window of opportunity for Pakistan. For instance, the first lecture from MIT will be held soon through video- conferencing. This will be the first of a series of lectures. We have linked all the universities together by fibre — 10 universities are now fully linked up and the linkage of the rest will be completed in the next couple of months. The PAKSAT-1 project has succeeded in getting a Pakistani satellite in place — and that has an enormous capacity — and we are using all these facilities now to use distance-learning as an effective tool. And this is being done under the umbrella of the Virtual University.

The fifth aspect is linkages with industry and agriculture. This is a vitally important aspect because at the moment education is not need-oriented. There has been no long-term planning or vision where this country is going, what are going to be our needs five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road? Are we going to make aircraft, computers or chips or pharmaceuticals? What is the industrial vision of Pakistan? Our educational programmes have to be linked to this so that we may have the ability to deliver.

Jointly with the ministry of industries, we are working out proposals to see what is going to be done by Pakistan and what kind of needs does it have in the next 15 to 20 years. I will be talking to the prime minister, and I will be asking him that there should be a consensus behind the scene, a bipartisan approach. The opposition should also be involved in this vision process so that if there is a change in government, the basic parameters don’t change, and we come forward with a medium- and long-term development vision of Pakistan.

This should be based on a discussion process in which educationists, planners, scientists, engineers are involved, and then dovetail our own programmes to this vision so that we produce the kind of quality and quantum of human resources that are required.
 

Q: Will Pakistan be able to compete with other countries, and be able to find the market for its products?

A: Absolutely. We have 140 million people — almost 100 million are below the age of 30. That is our real resource. We have to tap into our young people and train them in areas where there are opportunities. And there are lots of such areas. For instance, the castor oil industry in the world relies on one starting material, which occurs in abundance in medicinal plant form in Punjab area. There is a huge opportunity here. There are thousands of such opportunities for going into value-added products and processes.

Pakistan absolutely should change gear and move out from agriculture. About 81 per cent of total exports from Pakistan are directly or indirectly linked to agricultural produce, and, therefore, they are subject to the vagaries of weather, and they also have the problem of being low on value-addition because they are not in high-tech areas.

So, the name of the game now is high technologies. If you want genuine poverty alleviation, it will not come from increasing your agricultural output. Our GDP is $65 billion. Twenty-five per cent of that — $17-18 billion — comes from agriculture. Even if you have a 30 per cent agricultural growth, you at best will only add $3 billion or $4 billion to your GDP. You may go up from $65 billion to $70 billion. You are not going to go from $65 billion to $165 billion. So there is no way out except to go into hi-tech areas or into value-added products.

The interview panel included Raja Asghar, Ihtasham ul Haque and Nasir Iqbal.