PAKISTAN has never had a very bright past as far as science and research is concerned. With only one Nobel Prize winner in the field, we have struggled hard against various political, educational and economic upheavals, which has left us far behind in the field of research and development. In fact, over 60 years have passed without any specific breakthrough, and our scientist and researchers can be counted on fingers.

Universities and colleges are more like rote memory examination centres where students simply absorb everything that they have been given to memorise without making an effort to understand it. Teachers can be significantly held responsible in this regard since they fail to communicate their knowledge to the youth in a manner which is not only interesting, but thought provoking as well. The product, therefore, is a generation which does not have the ability to think about new avenues and to break the stereotypes.

There are numerous schools and colleges both registered and unregistered which are nothing but a compromise for parents' inability to pay sum loft amount as fee of some highly expensive schools, which somehow are better than the rest.

Moreover, clouds of doubt hang over the researches that are carried out by the universities. Some researches are so cleverly plagiarised by the so-called scholars, that one cannot tell whether they are genuine or not. Although HEC has come up with software that will ensure the thesis is not copied and pasted, will it ensure if it has be rephrased or written in any language other than English? Interestingly, some time ago, a few professors in the Punjab University were caught copying thesis from the one submitted by a foreign researcher.

However, there is a segment in the society that claims that since the time Higher Education Commission has been formed, a lot is being done in the field of research and development. The budget has been increased by 14 per cent for the higher education than it used to be. At present there are around 11,000 faculty members in various universities of Pakistan, and according to HEC, less than 30 per cent of them hold a PhD degree while only 600 are currently carrying out various researches.

It is believed that HEC has approved projects estimated of more than Rs35 billion while the rest of almost Rs25 billion are to approved soon. HEC claims that previously it managed to send nearly 2000 students abroad for PhD and now they plan to send 1,000 students every year. Those who are fortunate enough to win the HEC scholarship for PhD, are also eligible to compete for Rs6 million for research in their last year of study abroad.

However, to ensure their return to Pakistan, HEC has put in place certain regulations under which the scholars have to sign a bond for a certain period of time after completing their PhD to teach in their homeland. HEC also boasts of a 300 per cent raise in research publications. HEC Chairman Dr Attaur Rehman is quite optimistic about the situation.

“The University Linkage Programme has been introduced to promote enhanced international research collaboration by linking departments in Pakistani universities with their counterparts in leading research uni­versities abroad,” he says while talking to Sci-tech World. “Through a collaborative arrangement with the British Council, 50 such linkages have been initiated between Pakistani and British universities” he said.

However, Dean faculty of Science University of Karachi Dr Fahimuddin says that he is not aware any such foreign faculty hiring.

“We have approved of the MPhil and PhD programme, but as far as the foreign faculty hiring is concerned, the matter lies with the Board of Advanced Studies and I am not quite aware of it,” he says. “I don't actually think it is much of a necessity as we have quite a few qualified people who can handle the task of research and development pretty well”.

Dr Fahimuddin also maintains that if there are 100 PhDs produced by KU every year, more than 60 per cent are from the faculty of science.

“Apart from this, the thesis submitted by our people are regularised by well-known scientists and researchers around the globe”.

Chief Manager Suparco Arshad H Siraj says there is a lot going on at the moment as far as R and D is concerned.

“Of course, now there is far more emphasis on research than it used to be. If you look at Suparco, for example, we are working on application and research areas. We carry out most of our researches on our own and according to what we need to work on” he points out.

There are two main aspects that Suparco is working on remote sensing satellites and communication. And for both he claims that research is integral.

“Our remote sensing satellite will cover agricultural production and yield, and will therefore help in better production and prediction in this respect” he explains. The communication satellite, on the other hand, studies the ionosphere and how it affects the communication and weather in our part of the world.

However, talking about the research and development environment in universities, Siraj feels that it will take at least 35 to 40 years for the seeds of researches to yield fruits.

“Earlier on, only those students who had enough money to go abroad would manage to get enrolled in foreign universities and carry research there. However, since there was no such research environment back home they preferred staying there and working on their respective projects. Research facilities and environment and researchers are like chicken and egg; none can exist without the other” he opines.

“I remember the time when I was a student at KU and we used to have Arab students studying with us. And now you see our students going in Arab countries to study” he says.

But Siraj is also optimistic about how things are developing now and feels that they are on the right track. He also feels that now the government is investing both in researchers and ensuring that they return to benefit the country, and also investing at the same time in creating the research environment for them. Hopefully, future generations will see a better set of teachers and educational environment to begin with.

However, Siraj also adds that it is not just the government, but various industries as well, that need to contribute to the field of R and D.

“The reason that you do not see many researches being carried out here is that there are no industries as such that would invest in the universities to carry out studies for them. In the West it is not always the government that invests in studies; it is the industries that fund the universities to carry out researches” he reasons.

The Government of Sindh is pretty much known for its Environment and Alternate Energy Department which no other provincial government has so far. Secretary of the department, Mir Hussain Ali says that their department is more focused on carrying out studies which are actually projects that are concerned with causes of pollution and effective measures to control it. However, he failed to point out any significant study that they could boast about.

But critics maintain that despite the rosy picture painted by the government and its departments, the area of research and development has been sadly neglected and misused.

In one of his recent columns in Dawn, Parvez Hoodbhoy, Chairman, department of physics, Quaid-i-Azam University wrote that even though spending on higher education has increased 15 times over the last five years, the improvements have been cosmetic. Hoodbhoy feels that genuine science in Pakistan has actually shrunk, not grown, over the last three decades and that the trend has not been reversed.

“Euphoric claims notwithstanding, public university education in Pakistan remains miserably backward by international standards. Its real problems are yet to be touched,” he wrote. When asked to point out the real problem that holds the country back in R and D Hoodbhoy says that it is not just Pakistan, but the Islamic World in general that has to look out for the problem area.
“Internal causes led to the decline of Islam's scientific greatness long before the era of mercantile imperialism. To contribute once again, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong ...Science can prosper among Muslims once again, but only with a willingness to accept certain basic philosophical and attitudinal changes” he added in his column.

And those changes, we hope, are not very far.

Speaks the critic
DR Syed Jaffar Ahmed of the Pakistan Studies Department in University of Karachi is quite sceptical about the overall research methodology. “Research culture has been quite poor in the country on the whole. It is not that there is scarcity of funds anymore it is that there are not people capable and enthusiastic enough to carry out researches. Moreover earlier the situation was quite opposite to this, there were people willing to carry out researches but there wasn't any funding. Now we don't have faculty that is trained for research and it is more so in faculty of arts” he maintains. When asked why there had been much of researches being carried out in science than there had been in the domain of arts he says, in the era of 50s to 70s one would come across many research scholars however once they retired in the 80 there as a huge gap left which could not be covered up.

Apart from this Dr Ahmed says that the students lack basic knowledge about the methodology of research.

“It is actually very disturbing when a student ends up with us after 16 years of basic education and is not even capable of writing a sentence on his/her own. All they are there for is to copy lectures and then reproduce them in the exams.

'Secondly, in sciences you will see that most of the researches are carried out in labs and there they have supervisors who oversee them. Whereas, if you are doing a thesis in any arts subject you will get to meet your supervisor after weeks and months” he argues.

He also feels that as far as publishing research papers in foreign journals in concerned HEC should come up with criteria that is both realistic and achievable.

“You have to keep the ground realities in mind for this and they should rather set one benchmark at a time rather than expecting too much,” Dr Ahmed adds.