Federal Minister for Science and Technology Dr Atta-ur-Rehman has said that solid steps have been taken to build a knowledge based economy, a key to country's future development.
Addressing the overseas Pakistanis at Pakistan High Commission here late on Friday, he outlined the vision for higher education based on the premise knowledge is power. Pakistan's High Commissioner to the UK Dr Maleeha Lodhi was present on the occasion.
Dr Atta-ur-Rehman, made a stopover here after attending a conference in Geneva. He is scheduled to leave for Islamabad on Friday.
He gave a detailed resume of the steps and the educational reforms introduced during the past three years to provide a strong higher educational base through the development of the human capital of the country.
Lamenting the neglect of research and development in the past, he said Pakistani engineering universities could produce only five PhDs in past 50 years. The plight of the rest of the Muslim world in respect of higher learning was not better either.
Atta said of the top 500 universities in the world, only two were located in the Muslim world in Turkey.
The Gross Domestic Product of the entire Muslim world, who possessed 70 percent of the world's energy resources was half of Germany.
No country can match the national income of a small country like Austria, which gave an inkling of the position of the Muslim world in the global economy.
He called for a multi-dimensional approach to promote higher education in the country by building capacity of the faculties of the universities by diverting the required resources. At present 80 percent of the resources allocated for higher education were being spent for this purpose.
The Internet was the key area and his Ministry had worked out a national strategy for the purpose to encourage its rapid spread.
The budgetary allocation for the Science and Technology has been increased 6000 percent, which showed the government's commitment to promote it.
Besides, government had adopted three pronged approach to promote science and technology. First it was sending about 400 bright students for doing PhDs from foreign universities, mostly to Germany and France with zero fee structure.
The students were not being sent to the UK or USA as these were both expensive and people had the tendencies to stay back.
Second prong was indigenous promotion of the PhDs, he said and added the country had produced 200 PhDs last year which was far below than his target of producing at least 1500 PhDs per year.
Thirdly, the government wanted to stop the brain drain and efforts were underway to bring back 1500 highly qualified overseas Pakistanis back home.
With the current allocation of resources for science and research, he said, there would not be an excuse for the scholars not to carry out the research in future.
Moreover, Pakistan had created a linkage with the foreign universities as had been done in 15 British universities to enable the students access their lectures and resources.
Atta said that curricula at the higher level had been revised after 30 years and he was horrified to see it such a state of affairs.
Earlier, Deputy High Commissioner of Pakistan High Commission Murad Ali welcomed Dr Atta-ur-Rehman and thanked him to brief the overseas expatriates on a wide range of measures being initiated for promotion of higher education in the country.
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