Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Another blunder is ready to add further embarrassment to administration of CDA as it has been failed to complete attestation process of the degrees of its employees, which was initiated by the authority in April 2015.

The whole practice of last one year is also useless because the Higher Education Commission (HEC) has refused the civic body to collectively attest degrees as per its policy.

According to details, the CDA management had constituted a three member committee comprising of Director General Administration, Director General HRD and Secretary CDA Board to collaborate with HEC to devise a workable and comprehensive strategy to ensure the transparent and prompt degree verification process in last year.

Besides devising a workable plan, the said committee had initiated the process of degree verification without preparing a strategy or even without a communication with relevant departments to get how know of the rules and practices i.e. HEC.

The employees of the authority were asked by the committee to submit their academic credentials for attestation. The employees showed reluctance in beginning and had not submitted their documents for months after the first notice was served by the committee in this regards. The degree verification committee was issued a number of notices to its employees for the submission of documents one after another.

Besides internal hampering and pressure, the repeated notices, warnings and salary freezing had resulted in a response by employees of the authority, who at the end forced to submit their documents with the authority, but it consumes more than a year.

The story take twist when CDA contacted the HEC to attest degrees than it refused to attest the degrees of civic authority’s employees in bulk as it is not in the policy of HEC and asked the authority’s management to seek attestation of its employees on individual bases.

Asif Shah Jahan, Secretary CDA Board, who is also a member of the degree verification committee, while responding on the issue has confirmed that the HEC declined to attest the degrees of CDA employees and ask to follow attestation process on individual bases.

One the other hand the HEC officials were of the view that the commission does not attest degrees in bulk, but to facilitate the government institutions the commission provides a facility to counter check the attested academic certificates on the request of respective department.

While talking to the Daily Times, Member Administration CDA Amir Ali Ahmed said; “Although, the HEC refused us, but at least we have collected the degrees of all employees and made a data base, which is an exemplary step as CDA don’t have the complete academic record of our employees since the creation of the authority.”

“We are committed with the cause and will again request HEC to find out a solution otherwise we will go to the other option and ask our employees to seek attestation of their degrees, but I ensure you that this process will not be suspended till completion”, he said. The wastage of time is not so simple, but an institutional conspiracy is behind it to shelve the whole process as sources inside the HEC has told on the condition of anonymity, “The CDA officials contacted us in last year and we stated the same procedure then why they adopted wrong way”.