PESHAWAR: The Higher Education Department (HED), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has framed model statutes to be applicable in all public sector universities of the province for bringing uniformity in their affairs, according to sources.

Currently, each public sector university has its own statutes for running its administrative, financial and academic affairs.

However, all the public sector universities would have the same statutes with the implementation of the model statutes, additional secretary HED Dr Khalid Khan told Dawn.

He said that the statutes would introduce uniform rules and regulations for the state-run universities.

“Best financial practices and regulations of the national universities have been incorporated in the model statutes,” said Khalid Khan, the architect of the statutes.

Sources said that the model statutes had been framed on the directives of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Sardar Mahtab Ahmad Khan.

Official says move aimed at bringing uniformity in affairs of the universities

The governor, who is also chancellor of the public sector universities, had told the HED officials in a meeting almost a year ago that if all universities had been functioning under the same act then why their statutes were different from each other.

The additional secretary said that in the preparation of model statutes efforts had been made about how to effectively run the universities academically, administratively and financially.

The need for the model statutes was felt after promulgation of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Universities Act, 2012 being implemented in all universities in the province. Prior to this law, every university had its own law passed by the provincial assembly.

The sources said that through the model statutes a uniform procedure for the promotion of the employees and disciplinary action had been introduced.

They said that the draft of the model statutes was also shared with the vice-chancellors of all the universities for incorporating their recommendations into it. Of them, seven VCs had given different proposals for bringing improvements in the model statutes.

Afterwards, HED formed a committee to review the proposals of the VCs for incorporating them into the statutes, they said.

Asked how the HED will implement the model statutes in the universities, the sources said that the HED had decided to amend the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Universities Act, 2012 for this purpose.

Under the amended KPUA, 2012 the universities would be asked to implement the model statutes within six months with the approval of the concerned bodies of the respective universities.

They said that the formation of same statutes for all government universities was part of the reform agenda of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf-led Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government.

The sources said that the model statutes would be more beneficial for the universities to be established in future because the administration of the new universities would have ready-made statutes to adopt for running the affairs from the day one.

They said that several universities established by the incumbent and the previous governments had yet to prepare their own statutes.

These universities have adopted the statutes of other universities, they said.

Published in Dawn, January 18th, 2016