Education sector be handled beyond politics, pleads Atta

KARACHI - Former Chairman Higher Education Commission (HEC) Prof Dr Atta-ur-Rehman has said that the education sector should be treated beyond the politics for the best interest of Pakistani nation.
He said that the government needed to invest huge amount in the education sector as the quality and standard of the education was considerably low in the country.
He was speaking at the inaugural ceremony of the 35th All Pakistan Science Conference on Genomics for Health and Prosperity, held on Saturday at the auditorium of International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS), Karachi University (KU).
The conference was jointly organised by the KU Faculty of Science and Pakistan Association for Advancement of Sciences. Hundreds of Pakistani scientists and experts from all over the country and abroad have been gathered here to review the problems faced by the experts in the their disciplines. Pakistani scientists from USA, UK, Canada, Iran, Uganda and Somalia are also participating in this conference.
Dr Atta said that the real wealth of the nation was our youth while it was disgusting that only 4.7 per cent youth of 17 to 23 age groups had access to higher education. Conversely, 85 per cent Korean youth of the same age groups have access to higher education, he said. HEC had sent more than 3000 students on account of MPhil and PhD programme, while during the last 50 years on the platform of the old University Grant Commission (UGC) only 50 students had been sent abroad on the same account, he said.
KU Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Pirzada Qasim Raza Siddiqui, said that during the last 7 or 6 years, positive change had been brought in the higher education sector. “But there is still direly needed to create educational and science culture to bring the country on the track of progress.”
Talking about the efforts made by the HEC, he said HEC under the supervision of Dr Atta-ur-Rehman provided an opportunity to the public universities to rebuild their infrastructure and equipped their laboratories through huge financial resources provide by the previous government. Dr Atta enables us to think about the resource generation for the benefit of the universities.