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We’ll turn brain-drain to brain-gain: Professor Atta

ISLAMABAD: Dr Atta ur Rehman, chairman Higher Education Commission (HEC), said 250 expatriate professional Pakistanis had returned to help the government impart quality education. Under the faculty development programme, 1,500 expert expatriate Pakistanis would be inducted in different universities nationwide, Dr Rehman told PTV.

“We are converting brain-drain into brain-gain,” he said, adding that presently only 1,700 out of the 7,000 university teachers had PhD degrees. He said he hoped the currant annual figure of 200 PhD would increase to about 1,200 to 1,500 within four to five years. He said 1,000 scholarships were annually given to deserving students who wanted to continue higher education. Dr Rehman said the government was sponsoring exceptional students for higher education abroad.

Around 250 students had already been sent, while an additional 125 would depart next month for Germany, France, Austria, China and Netherlands. He said 2.9 percent of the students between the ages of 18 to 23 had access to higher education in Pakistan while in Korea it was 68 percent. This capacity would be doubled in the next five years; he said, adding that new university campuses were opening in different cities nationwide.

He said the capacity of public sector universities would be doubled to enhance quality education and added that the government had launched a digital library with about 17,000 free journals out of which 11,600 journals offered the entire text of all articles 2,000 only offered the abstracts. Dr Rehman said it was the provincial government’s responsibility to stop the proliferation and establishment of substandard institutes, adding that HEC had declared 180 educational institutes illegal and had announced their degrees null and void.

The chairman of HEC said that laws were being made more effective in this regard and he advised and warned substandard institutes to clean up their act or face being closed down in 2007 under the Federal Cabinet decision of 2002 about substandard universities. app

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