The Higher Education Commission (HEC) Executive Director Prof Dr Sohail H. Hayat while addressing a video conferencing seminar on Monday in connection with the 10 years establishment of HEC, said that six Pakistani universities have been ranked among the top 300 Asian universities while two Pakistani universities are standing among the top 300 sciences and technology institutions of the world.
Besides this, 41 more universities had been established across the country in a span of ten years to educate the people with modern and quality education, he observed. Dr Sohail urged the educationists and the researchers to maintain good relations with the industry in order to transform their knowledge into goods and services by solving the problems of the industries with the help of good research work.
Highlighting the contributions of the HEC during the last ten years, he said that they had enabled the spread of higher education to every region of Pakistan with an increase in the number of university campuses in Pakistan from 168 to 258, including the establishment of 41 new universities. While sharing statistics with the participants, Dr. Sohail said that due to the efforts of the HEC, there was an increase in student enrollment at universities from 330,000 to over a million, increase in the enrollment of women in universities from 36 percent to 46 percent, awarding of more than 10,000 local and foreign scholarships through a well-defined and transparent mechanism that did not make any compromise on merit, awarding of 2,000 scholarships for the talented youth of Balochistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and the launch of additional 600 MPhil/PhD scholarships exclusively for the students of Balochistan.
Prof Dr Zakir Hussain said the university was bearing a deficit budget of Rs. 150 million two years ago but because of good financial interventions, the university surplus budget had gone up to Rs. 480 million this year. He pointed out that the university was standing among the top universities of country as it had emerged to number six in the overall rankings, whereas last year the university was at number 19. He lauded the steps taken by the HEC to improve the quality of education for making them at par with international standards by raising the standard of education and uplifting the status of the teaching staff with hefty pays.
He apprised that the university was committed to take any tangible steps for meeting the criteria of 33 agendas set by the HEC. He said that it was a matter of pride for the varsity that it had 200 PhDs and had hired 70 teachers on tenure track system. He also informed the audience about the new campus of the university which was being set up at Jhang road on 200 acres of land. The new building would be built at a distance of a few kilometers from the current campus to meet the demand of increasing students, he added.
