KARACHI, Dec 4: The Sindh High Court on Tuesday directed the administration of Karachi University to issue admit cards to two student sisters for appearing in the upcoming BA Part-II examination.

A division bench headed by Chief Justice Mushir Alam was seized with the petition of Mohammad Tariq whose two naturalised Pakistani-Canadian daughters were not being issued the admit cards for want of equivalence certificates.

Earlier, the examination forms of the two sisters were accepted by the university administration only after their father moved the court for the purpose.

The applicant had sought court injunction to the Inter-Board Committee of Chairmen (IBCC) for the issuance of equivalence certificate to his two naturalised Pakistani-Canadian daughters whose exam forms for BA Part-II had not been accepted by Karachi University for want of IBCC documents. He had applied for the IBBC documents in November 2010.

The petitioner, represented by Advocate Nasir Ahmed, impleaded the federal education secretary, IBCC chairman, secretary, and Assistant Secretary Wilayat Khan Khattak, and vice chancellor and controller of examination of Karachi University as respondents.The two sisters — Hina Fatima and Sadia Tariq — did graduation from the British Columbia School System, Canada in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

On Tuesday, comments on behalf of the IBCC chief, secretary and assistant secretary were filed in the court. The respondents submitted that the applicant sisters had not filed their respective original transcripts, which were required under the law.

They said that the IBCC had sent a letter and several reminders to the British Columbia School System, Canada for verification of the applicants’ transcripts, but no reply was yet received from the institution.

The court on a previous hearing had directed the federal law officer to ensure that the authority concerned get verification of certificates of the student sisters.

The bench expressed displeasure over the lethargic attitude of the respondent officials towards the case of the petitioner’s daughters and observed that the authority concerned was responsible to get verification of the students’ academic certificate that they had obtained from a foreign educational institution.

The bench stated that attention of the deputy attorney general was drawn on Nov 16 to the e-mail address available on the documents of the two sisters to obtain verification promptly.

The court observed: “The petitioner cannot be made to suffer on account of inefficiency of public servants who are drawing hefty salaries but are unaware of latest technology which is now in very much practice and yet they are following the same conventional methods for entering into correspondence”.