President Pakistan Economic Resource Centre Hamid Sultan has said higher education is not just for the privileged class but it is the right of every Pakistani who has been left illiterate due to lack of proper educational facilities in the country.
Unfortunately, education has never been a priority in Pakistan but it has now sunk even lower in governmental preferences. He said during the recent days, the Ministry of Finance has been at loggerheads with the vice chancellors of 72 public sector universities, who have been threatening to go on strike if the government does not release Rs 7.5 billion supplementary grant that they require to pay their employees 50 percent salary increase the current budget promised them, meet their developmental expenses, and continue supporting students studying abroad on Higher Education Commission (HEC) scholarships.
When the development budget is frozen, and the government allocation of funds to HEC is already 19 billion less than what the education sector needs than such a scenario shall obviously appear. He said the present budget allocation of Rs 15.8 billion for this fiscal year is already being reduced further. The government has just released Rs 2.1 billion to HEC.
"We would like to remind our finance minister that higher education is not just for the privileged class, it is the right of every Pakistani," he said. Sultan said the situation reflects an extremely insensitive attitude towards education. He said the nation "must decide whether it wants a single surgeon or 50 skilled welders. A welder cannot clean clogged arteries and a surgeon cannot mend broken pipes; but both are vital to our existence.
He said the fact of the matter is that most of these students belong to ordinary middle class families, who cannot afford to study in foreign institutions of higher learning on their own. The government sent them abroad not as a favour, but to improve human resource as part of a plan to put the country on the path to socio-economic progress.
Sultan said Rs 7.5 billion the universities want in order to remain functional is not such a big amount, considering that this government has tolerated huge leakages - euphemism for corruption - in public sector corporations without lifting a finger to stop them. To quote just one example, within one year on its watch, a profit-making entity, Pakistan Steel Mills, ran Rs 22 billion loss, and had to be bailed out through a cash injection of about Rs 20 billion.