According to SCImago, a publically available portal to analyse the scientific knowledge, Pakistan published 1493 papers in 2001 and this number increased to 20548 in 2018. Pakistan was ranked at 51st position in 2001 and almost after two decades the country is ranked at 38th position. Pakistan is now ahead of many countries like New Zealand, Ireland, Luxemburg, and Argentina in publishing the research papers. Budget of Rs. 987.58 million has been spent on travel grants for conferences during 2017 to 2019. Almost 4,792 papers presented at different conferences around the globe. On the other hand once we look into the improvement in knowledge diffusion, say in terms of innovation, Pakistan ranked at 105th position in innovation index. The numbers of patent applications by residents are 193 and Pakistan ranked at 55th position, India at 8th, Indonesia at 18th position and many other peer countries like Sri Lanka, Moroco, Iraq, Philippine, Sudan are ahead of us. Similarly, Pakistan ranked at 91st position in knowledge diffusion index, considerably behind India and many other countries like Malawi, Oman, Moroco, Kenya, Nepal and Mali.
After two decades of investment in higher education and research, we have a lot to present in terms of number of publications and PhDs but the direct and indirect benefit to society seems very negligible. Creative ideas and counting of literature is not based on societal problems, the flow of ideas is not systematically linked with production processes to scale up; and thus not leading to societal development as a natural process. Rather then providing the solutions to problems of societal, political and entrepreneurial complexities, universities are serving as production units of research papers.
Developing countries are usually the origin and not the destination for academic/conference tourism but fact of the matter is we cannot transform our higher educational institutions to be attractive enough to get attention from the international academic community for any intellectual discourse
Both the direction of knowledge creation and diffusion are not properly understood in the realm of our higher education system. The dual nature of epistemology is barely realized. At present time, especially in developing countries the universities and higher education institutions are facing dual challenges: first, to deal with ‘convergence’ to compete and to catch up with the world’s top universities, and second, ‘divergence’ in knowledge creation and exploration to deal with our localized problems.
Conference tourism is a well-established sub-sector of business tourism with high economic impact and significant source of revenues. According to an Economic Impact Study conferences and meetings contribute £ 21.1 billion to government tax revenues, accounting for 3.6 percent of over all UK tax. During the last three years Pakistan spent Rs 689.5 million to organize local conferences and Rs 987.58 millions as travel grant to facilitate faculty members to present their papers in international conferences. However, there are hardly few researchers who visited Pakistan to participate in our conferences and most of them are Pakistani expatriates and their main purpose is to meet their families. This is quite convincing that developing countries are usually the origin and not the destination for academic/conference tourism but fact of the matter is we cannot transform our higher educational institutions to be attractive enough to get attention from the international academic community for any intellectual discourse.
Finally, we can’t ignore the fact that on average the annual budget for higher education during the last few years has been almost Rs 40 billion. The return on this investment is not visible in innovation, industry, and policy or on any other segment of society. There is a huge demand for locally targeted research, for instance, local crop production in agriculture, market and economy, bioscience and local viruses, but most of the research topics are bizarre and purposeless.
The writer is associate professor at Institute of Business Administration, Karachi