Rs 285 million separate package for universities of B'stan, G-B

A special package of Rs285 million has been separately allocated for universities of Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan, over and above their normal allocation for the upcoming financial year 2020-2021.

The FATA University has also been prioritised and its allocation has been tripled.

The funding for all universities has been increased strictly on the basis of their performance, as indicated by the number of research publications by their faculty members, the number and amounts of the research grants received, the bandwidth utilized for access to digital libraries and Internet resources, the amount spent on conferences and professional travel, and the number of PhD faculty, and PhD students.

Due to paucity of funds compared with the requirement, a principle decision has been taken by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) regarding newly-established universities. During next year, no new university is being added to recurring grant stream of the HEC.

Almost 20 newly-established universities have approached the HEC for funding from the next year. The inclusion of new universities would have resulted in a reduction of the allocations to older universities.

The Higher Education Commission had requested the federal government to allocate Rs104.789 billion as recurring grant for FY 2020-21.

The requirement includes funds for universities as well as for pursuing the HEC research agenda, the start of several new initiatives (NAHE, ETC, HEMIS, PERU, and P-15 Research Universities), funding for the Tenure Track Faculty, funding for the Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN), and the resources needed to meet the COVID-19-related challenges.

Despite resource constraints to the federal exchequer, the federal government has allocated Rs70 billion to the HEC as recurring grant for the next year 2020-2021, which represents an increase of only 9.2 per cent in comparison with the current year's (2019-20) funding of Rs64.1 billion.

However, considering inadequacy of funding for next year, the HEC has requested the prime minister to consider enhancement in the budgetary allocation to the HEC.

In two separate letters, the chairman HEC also apprised the federal minister for Federal Education and Professional Training, and adviser on finance and revenues, of the enormously deleterious consequences of inadequate allocation to the higher education.

Both offices have been requested to intervene at this critical movement and enhance the HEC budgetary allocation for the next year. The HEC has carried out a rigorous exercise for allocation of funds among the HEC National Research Programmes, various type of universities/HEIs considering their needs and availability of overall funding, and the HEC Secretariat expenses, etc, which constitute less than one percent of the total allocated funds.