HEC Scholars speak for their future

Paucity of funds puts future of students at stake

Friday, April 03, 2009
By By Perwez Abdullah

Karachi


The futures of over 400 students who were granted various Higher Education Commission (HEC) scholarships are at stake as the HEC has failed to provide the money pledged to these students. HEC officials, meanwhile, cite the financial crunch as the reason behind the funds being stopped by the government.

While the HEC is blaming the government, officials from the government claim that the global recession has reached Pakistan as well, resulting in a dearth of finances. HEC Director General Dr Sohail Naqvi told The News that the HEC received only Rs8 billion against the budgeted Rs18 billion.
"We are using the bulk of the eight billion rupees for scholars who are already enrolled in various programmes at home and abroad. We are not in a position to begin new programmes now," he explained.

Dr Naqvi denied that the HEC is spending lot of money on its countless employees. "We have about 700 employees and none of them can be called ‘white elephants’. We are not spending on ourselves."

Some students and senior professors of private and public sector universities criticised the government for appropriating the taxpayers’ money for its ‘personal’ use. "The government is buying bullet-proof cars, helicopters and a fleet of vehicles for an army of ministers, advisors and other VIPs who are clogging roads with their entourage. All this money should have gone into education. But no one cares," they lamented.

Mohammad Jamaluddin Thaheem is one of the 400 students who are waiting to receive the good news from HEC so that he can go abroad and resume his studies. "I applied for the HEC scholarship under their Universities of Engineering, Science and Technology of Pakistan (UESTP) Programme. The last date of application was January 10, 2008. After waiting for over three months, I was short-listed for an interview in April 2008 that was held at the HEC Regional Centre, Karachi, on May 15, 2008," he said.

Thaheem was provisionally selected for the scholarship in May 2008. With a guaranteed admission in Politecnico di Torino, Italy, the HEC scholarship was an added prospect for him. The HEC asked Thaheem along with 85 other students for the science, engineering and technology scholarship, to get their documentation in order. Thaheem’s documents had to be translated in Italian and other languages and verifications/attestations had to be done, which he duly completed despite the time, effort and money involved in the process.

Politecnico di Torino confirmed Thaheem’s admission in a four-year PhD programme in July 2008. He immediately applied for student visa which received on September 1, 2008.

"Everything was going according to plan, although there were rumours that the government had stopped funding. Meanwhile, the HEC chairman at the time, Professor Atta-ur-Rehman also resigned, which somewhat confirmed these doubts. But the repeated confirmations from HEC, that our scholarship was intact, kept our hopes alive," Thaheem said.

In November 2008, the HEC emailed all candidates who were government employees to either apply for a nine-year (four years of study plus five years of service) leave and NOC from their departments or resign. Many people resigned after this. Although Thaheem was not a government employee, he too resigned to prepare for his departure.

"On November 29, 2008, the HEC sent us an email informing us of that our scholarship has been put on hold, and we were advised not to proceed till further orders. We were extremely disappointed by this – almost one year of preparation and anticipation seemed to have gone to waste. We protested but the HEC has not done anything so far," Thaheem explained.

Thaheem and some other students, on their persistence, were finally allowed a meeting with Dr Sohail Naqvi and Project Manager, UESTP-Italy, Waseem Hashmi Syed on January 5, 2009. "I went to Islamabad to attend this meeting but both gentlemen made it clear that the funding issue was out of their hands," he said.

Thaheem and his group of students have written letters to the president, prime minister, speaker of the National Assembly, Punjab chief minister, Sherry Rehman (Federal Information Minister at the time) and most political leaders and prominent journalists. There has been no response so far.

The group also met the Italian Ambassador in Pakistan, Vincenzo Prati, and the Consul General of Italy in Karachi, Domenico Benincasa, and sought their help. The Italian Ambassador spoke to Prime Minister Gilani a few times but nothing has come out of it. The Italian delegates were sympathetic but expressed their inability to helping them. They (the diplomats) also told the students that the Italian universities could not provide them with scholarships. Unfortunately, January 23, 2009 was the last date for enrolment in the Italian universities.



Source: daily The NEWS