By Hamid Khan Wazir
ISLAMABAD/Peshawar: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government and the Higher Education Commission (HEC) have agreed to develop and implement a plan before June 2020 to help older universities overcome their pension crisis.
The agreement was reached in a meeting on university finances held between the Chairman HEC Tariq Banuri and Vice Chancellors of Public Sector Universities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and the Finance Minister KP Taimoor Saleem Jhagra, and the Adviser to Chief Minister KP on Higher Education Khaleeq-ur-Rehman.
The Vice Chancellors presented a proposal for consideration of HEC and the KP government. Following the deliberations, the KP government agreed on working together with HEC and the KP Public Sector Universities to take concrete steps to improve the quality of education and research in the province.
The participants also agreed to develop a framework that ensures that the cost of university education does not exceed the paying ability of different groups of students. To this end, the participants agreed to take measures to reduce costs, to broaden scholarship systems, and to link tuition and other costs to the family incomes of students.
The envisaged cost reduction measures include targets and milestones that will ensure transparency, efficiency, and high quality, the introduction of double entry bookkeeping, collection of data, and establishment of automation systems through HEC’s HEMIS programme.
The universities will also develop plans for enhancing resource mobilization from multiple sources. The provincial government will assist universities in filling the vacant positions of treasurers as soon as possible.
