RAWALPINDI, Nov 1: The Punjab governor, Lt-Gen Khalid Maqbool on Friday advocated self-governance in educational institutions and involvement of businessmen in running their affairs. He announced a grant of Rs30 million for 7 colleges of the city.

Speaking at a ceremony held to award higher education scholarships to 129 students of Rawalpindi division, he said, this grant would be used for provision of basic facilities in these colleges. He said the grant would suffice to fulfil most of the demands presented to him by the education department for these colleges.

The governor tried to pacify the teachers and students who are opposing the proposed higher education ordinance and board of governors to run universities. Responding to some of their objections regarding the BoGs, he said, “its neither the government’s policy to make education expensive nor do we intend to give rise to the feeling that the government is abdicating its responsibility of providing education”.

He said the government would not allow at any cost commercialization of education.

The governor further said, however, while doing all this the government would try to encourage the private sector to supplement its endeavour to provide quality education.

Later talking to the teachers, he said, the BoG concept was only meant to simplify the process of decision-making and solving the problems of institutions and the teaching community. Self-governance, Gen Maqbool said, would benefit the education system in the province.

About the skepticism of the teaching community regarding the involvement of the business community in running the affairs of the institutions, he said, the businessmen would only be inducted as members of the board, while the overall control would be with the district coordination officer and the principal, who would be the chairman and secretary of the BoG, respectively.

He said more representatives of teachers can be inducted into the BoG if they desire to counter the influence of the businessmen.

“Don’t ask me for cheap unemployment, get purposeful education,” he said and added “remain assured your (teaching community’s) rights would be fully safeguarded”.

The governor said, the guiding principles of the government while implementing the reforms were the quality of education, its purpose, managing the reforms and how to fund the reforms.

He said technical education in the province was being streamlined and tuned to the local requirements of the area. He said the entire syllabi up to intermediate level was being revised for improving the quality of education and would be fully implemented by 2004.

The task of revising the syllabi had been assigned to local teachers and this will be accomplished by them at lower cost while saving foreign exchange.

Meanwhile, the examination system, the governor said, was also being revamped and would be completed by 2003 to discourage the trend of cramming and encourage the students to use their mental faculties.

Stressing on the quality, he said, a professional audit of the private institutions in the province is being launched.

APP adds: He gave away the letters of scholarships to 129 students of different colleges.

The governor said the scheme had been launched to give 5000 scholarships per annum to the students of the province. This will definitely help them complete their education, he added.

“There is a need to opt for modern quality education to meet the future challenges”, he said adding this is imperative to gain the edge in different spheres.

Punjab Governor Khalid Maqbool said government has the responsibility to ensure education and health services for people at affordable cost.

He regretted that there were no lines of foreign students to get education in the country and called for promoting the quality of education to attract students from abroad.

He said only scientific and technological developments gave a nation or community an edge over others. He called for promoting quality education to compete with other nations of the world in the days ahead.