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‘Pakistan only country to have digital library’

* Atta says 256 quality teachers have returned home on govt invitation

Staff Report

KARACHI: Higher Education Commission chief Dr Attaur Rehman said on Sunday Pakistan was the only country where a digital library consisting of 17,000 science journals had been established.

“We are living in the era of economic wars and we have made education a mockery since the inception of Pakistan,” said Dr Rehman after laying the foundation stone of the Jamiat Delhi Siddiqui Community Cooperative Housing Society Ltd in Gulshan-e-Maimar. He said it was a matter of pride for Pakistan that it was the only country in the world in which a state-of-the-art digital library had been established. “This library has proved to be an effective source of reference and information for both researchers and students.”

The HEC chairman said the government had boosted the telecom sector a great deal due to which mobile phone technology was available to common people at affordable prices. He claimed a satellite in space would help improve education and literacy in Pakistan. “At present two educational TV channels are hooked to the satellite and it has still a huge provision for running 256 more such channels. We’ll have to wait for a few more years to see its positive results.”

Dr Rehman said the country would have to develop its manpower and produce skilled labour. “Today, we are living in the era of economic war,” he said and added that as many as 256 quality teachers had returned to Pakistan on the government’s invitation and more would return soon.

Alluding to higher education, he said successive governments had been making a mockery of education for the last 50 years or so. “Every past government had made tall claims about improvement in education sector but none of them had taken it seriously.”

Dr Rehman said: “Due to such non-seriousness of the past governments, a class system has come into being in the universities in general and in schools and colleges in particular. Our government has taken notice of it and has tried to give equal opportunities to all members of our society to get benefit of uniform education.” He said the government had taken effective steps by launching scholarship schemes, making improvements in educational standards and sanctioning manifold increases in the budget for higher education and science and technology. He noted that students and researchers were being sent to China, Germany, Austria and The Netherlands for PhD programmes, “which will hugely increase the number of highly educated persons in Pakistan”. The HEC chief said that in the near future at least 1,500 PhDs would be produced in Pakistan every year, and added the government had plans to send more than 15,000 students abroad for PhD programmes.

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