Federation of All Pakistan Universities Academic Staff Association has called upon Prime Minister Imran Khan to take notice of remarkable cut in the budget of higher education and urged him to allocate budget to higher education as per HEC's demand. In a letter written to Prime Minister, Imran Khan and other members of federal cabinet, FSPUASA President Dr Mahboob Hussain and others expressed serious concern of the teachers' community and said that it would seriously jeopardize progress of higher education sector in Pakistan. They said that this financial cut would force HEC shut down various academic programmes. They said that such policies would bring higher education sector of Pakistan to the Stone Age.
They said that the government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf had promised during elections that it would give top priority to the education sector. They said that there were many hopes from the PTI government that it would boost and support higher education. However, they said, such policies would let down the higher education sector.
FAPUASA leadership said that cut in financial assistance to HEC would make Pakistan's future bleak. They said that since the government was not extending support to the Higher Education Commission, the HEC had to shut down some academic programmes completely while funding of some programmes had been reduced drastically, which was bringing the overall higher education sector to a halt.
Dr Hussain has said neither provincial nor federal Higher Education Commission was providing any funding to the university teachers for participating and presenting research papers at the international conferences abroad, which was seriously discouraging the researchers who put in a lot of efforts to do research, writing papers and get them published by reputed foreign journals.
They said that instead of increasing the budget of the higher education sector as per claims during elections, the government had massively cut the recurring budget as the government has decided to allocate only Rs58 billion against HEC's demand of Rs103 billion. Teachers said that the future of any country was associated with education and if the government wanted Pakistan to prosper, it must give priority to education. They said that universities were the only institutions in the country which had rapidly made progress in the past few years due to which international ranking of all Pakistani universities had improved. However, if the government continued to ignore the higher education sector, research and development activities would be affected badly and all the process of making achievements at the international level would face reversal. FAPUASA called upon the government to act as per the promises made in the elections and give priority to education.
On the other hand in the 23rd Vice Chancellors' Committee Meeting chaired by Dr Masoom Yasinzai and attended by 137 Vice Chancellors and Rectors here on Monday, the university heads appreciated the Government's commitment to higher education, while seeking Government's further support to meet the rising financial requirements of the universities.
They said that despite an overall 10 percent cut in the budgets of government entities, the Vice Chancellors and Rectors of universities have expressed trust in the Government to protect the higher education sector's budget.
The meeting was also attended by Dr Tariq Banuri, Chairman Higher Education Commission (HEC) and Lt Gen Muhammad Asghar (Retd), Executive Director HEC.
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