PESHAWAR, April 10: Students of the Landi Kotal Degree College, Khyber Agency, have warned the administration that they would stage a protest demonstration in front of the governor house and encircle it if their demands were not accepted immediately.

Talking to newsmen at the Peshawar Press Club here on Thursday, representative of the college students Fazal Ghani said that they had knocked almost every door for the solution of their problems but no one in the province or at the federal level was ready to listen to their problems.

He, on this occasion, criticized the federal education minister Zubaida Jalal and said that she was not interested in the solution of the problems of the Federaly Administered Tribal Areas students.

Talking about their problems, he said that the degree college at Landi Kotal fulfilled all the requirements of a post-graduate college but the government did not want to give it its due status. He said that provincial minister for education Fazl Ali, who belonged to Swabi district, had upgraded the Swabi college to a post-graduate institution.

But, he said, the Landi Kotal college which was established before the Swabi college and was more in need of being upgraded had still remained neglected.

He said that in early days of the college the number of permanent teachers were 34 but now instead of an increase the number had decreased to 18 — 13 permanent and five on contract. He said this had resulted in the deterioration of academic standard of the college.

Mr Fazal said that the number of schools in the area had jumped up from two to 18 but the seats in college for the first year students had still remained at 160 as it was in the early days of the college.

He demanded that seats in the college be increased to at least 800.

He took strong exception to the corruption of the political administration of Khyber Agency and said that they took Rs300 from each student for the formation of domicile and national identity card.

He said that the National Database and Registration Authority, Governor of NWFP and WAPDA had directed the political administration not to take the amount from the students but they continued the practice.

He strongly criticized the FATA education secretariat and said that after their struggle they forwarded a file to the education secretariat from the governor but the file was lost.

He said that under the Khushal Pakistan Programme the president had approved 3.7 million rupees for the development of the college but the college did not receive even a rupee from the fund that had been distributed among the corrupt officials and staff of the political administration.—PPI