Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Post several protests staged by Young PhD Doctors Association (YPDA) against their unemployment, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) has now began collecting data of unemployed Pakistani scholars for reviewing their plight.

However, the young scholars declared the move as mere ‘face saving’ tactics. They said that that they now have been dispirited by the commission.

The young doctors were of the opinion that the HEC had just made claims and did nothing practically. According to the statistics, a total of 873 scholars are unemployed. They have been staging several protests to press the authorities for their demands apart from the application they submitted in the Human Rights Cell of Supreme Court in which they addressed Chief Justice Saqib Nisar to make influence of the apex court for resolving the issue.

In an official statement, the HEC claimed that the commission will support and facilitate PhD holders of Pakistan in their efforts for employment on merit and quality.

It added that in response to requests from unemployed PhD degree holders, the HEC had established an e-portal in order to collect basic information. The e-portal was launched in August 2018. As of today, 170 PhD holders have registered themselves. Out of these, 126 are unemployed.

However, only the creation of an e-portal and submission of data could not satisfy the young PhD holders. YPDA President Dr Sher Ali said that this is not the first time the HEC followed such practice.

“The commission has also in the past been taking such kinds of measures but these exercises were no more than paper work because our issue is still not resolved,” he regretted.

Moreover, Dr Sher Ali added that the e-portal contains several flaws as it does not accept the data of the scholars who did not avail the Interim Placement of Fresh PhD (IPFP) programme.

Besides this, he points out that the portal requires uploading only HEC’s attested degrees of foreign scholars while the attestation fee being around Rs 15,000 for each.

“Instead of giving relief to the unemployed scholars, the commission is more ambitious to accumulate money,” he alleged.

He said we request Prime Minister Imran Khan, who as per HEC act is controlling authority of the commission, to take a personal interest and resolve the issue on priority basis.

On the other hand, the HEC claimed in the statement that it has offered around 4,000 jobs to fresh PhD holders through the IPFP programme in universities and 80 percent were inducted in the same universities and the others were inducted by other higher education institutions. The statement quoted HEC Chairman Dr Tariq Banuri as saying, “The HEC is also looking at the patterns of unemployment. Most of the PhDs are in chemistry, agriculture, biology and physics. We are looking closely at these programmes to check how to enhance the employability of these graduates.”

Talking exclusively to Daily Times, Dr Tariq Banuri said that actually the HEC after a long discussion with these scholars and other officials had intended to collect statistics of such unemployed PhD scholars. For this purpose, an online portal was developed for facilitation.

“So far only 126 PhD scholars have registered themselves with HEC as unemployed through the portal,” he claimed suggesting that we encouraged maximum registration with that portal as, he added, the way forward policy regarding creation of opportunities to entertain such PhD scholars for jobs.

The chairman strongly denied the allegations by the young scholars for not including some scholars’ data with the e-portal. He also assured that he will direct his Information Technology department to review the portal and mend possible technical errors due to which some doctors may face hurlers while filling their details on the portal.

Reply to a question, Dr Banuri said, “I have written a letter to all public sector universities to entertain these scholars on priority basis. I have asked the universities that the merit and set standard should never be compromised.”

According to these scholars, before availing the scholarship, they had signed an agreement with the HEC under which they were bound to serve in Pakistani universities for five years. But the HEC is providing them only one year job under an IPFP scheme, which, he said, is very strange.

As per official figures of the HEC, currently the country has a shortage of 38,000 PhD scholars in different sectors.

Published in Daily Times, October 15^th 2018.