KARACHI: Sindh Governor Mohammad Zubair expressed that quality higher education is the basis for prosperity in every sphere of life and it sparkles an era of accelerated progress for any country. He was addressing the national research programme for universities award distribution ceremony at Governor House here today. Higher Education Commission Chairman Dr Mukhtar Ahmed and Vice Chancellors of various universities also attended the programme. The Sindh Governor asserted that education imparts values such as knowledge, wisdom and recognition to a person and it guides and leads such person towards path of success. “Higher education and research play fundamental role in building resources and promoting talent,” he added. “Research is the most vital ingredient of any development recipe as it not only provides solution to existing problems but also open new avenues of knowledge and learning. Availability of modern labs, high tech testing equipment’s and regularly upgraded IT networks are essentials components of research and productivity,” Zubair stated. Education not only prepares a person to face the world with utmost courage but also enrich him with the qualities such as tolerance, patience and co-existence. It was unfortunate that intolerance has reached to a level in our society that we are prepared to forcibly impose our thoughts and ideology on others,” he further added. “Promotion of quality higher education could end that sort of behavior,” he announced. He stated that people prefer to go to America for higher education only for the reason that it encourages research at every level. Its Universities are well known to induct budding researches from the globe and 90% of such researchers never leave USA and hence contribute toward the development of American Society to another level. While lauding the role of Higher Education Commission in promoting especially research at Universities, Governor Sindh said that it was commendable effort of HEC that the published research papers of Pakistanis which were only 800 in 2002, reached to 12000 during last year. He expressed that future of a nation heavily depends on quality and competence of the human resource. “There was an urgent need to prepare curriculum according to the new research in various fields of science and arts to produce competent and capable human resource,” Zubair stated. He also urged upon the Universities to prioritize research oriented education not only to resolve country’s problems but also to prepare our youth to the bigger challenges of competing successfully at international level. “We all have to promote and showcase the positive activities being carried out on all fronts, as it would depict a soft image of Pakistan to the international community. The role of media was very pivotal in this regard as people get motivated and inspired by the reporting of events,” he encouraged. Speaking on the occasion, HEC Chairman Dr Mukhtar Ahmed highlighted the achievements and goals of the Commission with special reference to efforts to promote research based education. The Governor Sindh distributed Awards to faculty members of various public and private sector universities for their research projects. University of Karachi secured 20 awards while Sindh University and Agha Khan University were awarded 12 and 10 grants, respectively.