ISLAMABAD – Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s directives appear to be a rhetoric as the Establishment Division has so far not sent any formal instruction to the Higher Education Commission (HEC) to complete the verification process of federal government employees’ educational degrees by April 4. The prime minister had set a two month deadline starting from February 5 for the verification of educational degrees. However, despite the passage of one month, no official instruction has been given to the HEC in this regard.
“We read about it in the newspapers, but we have not received any official communique,” HEC Accreditation and Attestation Director General Rahim Bux Channa told Pakistan Today. Another senior HEC official said a month had already passed and it was simply impossible to complete the process in a month and meet the deadline. “It is impractical to verify the degrees of over 0.49 million employees in a month … if we start the process now, it will take at least a year,” he said.
The prime minister had directed the Establishment Division on February 5 to verify the degrees of the government employees, but the task was later given to the Cabinet Division. Sources in the Establishment and Cabinet Divisions, however, called the prime minister’s directive a “political statement”. “It was a tactic to pressure the bureaucracy, as a large numbers of bureaucrats had been trying to defame parliamentarians holding fake degrees,” the sources said.
