Dec 12th

I just stumbled upon a very important article, critically looking at the degrading education in Pakistan. Titled “Education in Pakistan”, published in A Pakistan News (December 10, 2010), this article points to the grave irregularities in our education system. While it focuses mainly on privatization of the education sector, which has evoked condemnation and protest in Punjab province, it also mentions the important point that in our universities, academia is mostly incompetent and comes through favoritism.

Another aspect to the irregularities in this educational corruption is the often overlooked issue of compromising one’s own students at the expense of profits earned from outside projects. There are so-called research institutes in our country where students have been enrolled in postgraduate studies/research for over 4 or 5 years. But they are not given any attention or time, Instead, the senior academia is always looking for projects, especially foreign-funded projects (as they pay huge sums), to make quick money. These professors and other senior academic staff hold government offices but don’t fulfill their duties as government officers serving the purpose of promoting education. The result is that their own students keep suffering in studies while they keep earning more and more for personal gains.

It is highly recommended that foreign projects not choose public sector universities, especially those professors and academic staff that already have postgraduate students and are earning a fair amount as salary. If such academic staff is chosen for a project, they are bound to neglect the Pakistani students in favor of foreign profits. Before hiring any government officials from academic institutions, the project donors must check the records of the academia’s history, including the number of students he/she has been supervising and be made accountable for any irregularities in the course of their student’s progress. The country’s government also needs to tighten its rules regarding involvement of its academia in projects other than those funded by the government of Pakistan for benefiting its own students.



This syndicated post originally appeared at on 12 December 2010