Education always a priority for us: Qaim

Karachi

The provincial government has prioritised education during the last seven years which was evident from the fact that it established more than 10 universities in public sector with the objective to encourage higher education in the province, Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah claimed on Wednesday.

“The general impression that Sindh has been lagging behind in education holds no weight because facts speak about the huge funds invested in the sector with special emphasis on higher education,” he said.

He was speaking as the Chief Guest at the concluding session of the three-day Sindh-Hainan Universities Forum’s conference, organised by Sindh Madressatul Islam University at a local hotel.

He claimed that education has been the sector which Sindh government had unquestionably put on top of its priorities and with the involvement of the Chinese universities that field Sindh was bound to reap the fruit.

“PPP’s founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was architect of the Sino-Pak friendship when he was Pakistan’s Foreign Minister. Bhutto was the person whose endeavours got China and United States closer. Whereas in recent past, the former president, Asif Ali Zardari, visited China several times and explored more avenues to benefit Pakistan, and Sindh.”

He further said that he accompanied the former President on his trips to China a couple of times to explore possibilities of assistance in improving the agricultural sector of the province: “Given that Sindh has an agro-based economy, I was greatly interested in acquisition of better ways to improve the sector, and I am glad to say that the Chinese experts who later assisted us gave valuable suggestions which doubled our production of cotton and rice.” He also claimed that with export of this produce, the advantage also doubled. At the concluding remarks, CM Sindh announced a grant of Rs20 million for SMIU.

Later, the Vice chancellor, SMIU, Dr Muhammad Ali Shaikh, presented the report of the three-day conference to the CM. He informed that credit behind this initiative went to Shah which eventually got 14 universities of Pakistan signing 56 agreements with universities in Hainan.

Research centres

The heads of the Hainan’s and Sindh’s universities have agreed to set up mutually and equally funded Pakistan-China Research Centres in the universities of the respective provinces of the two countries to launch joint research projects.

They also initially agreed to launch student exchange programmes for short-term courses and proposed to plan long-term courses in future. The representatives of the four universities from Hainan province and 13 universities of Pakistan also discussed problems involved in these programs, which included visa process, fund transfers among others.

They decided that universities of both countries would send their students to each other for four-week and six-week courses, who would be issued with guest visas. The host universities would provide academic assistance, food and lodging to visiting students.

“There should be a platform where we could share information with each other. We should launch joint programmes, for which I place an offer to our Pakistani researchers that they will be welcomed for any research that interests the two countries, and we’ll be funding it,” said Professor Jianbao Li, President of Hainan University, while presiding over a concluding session.

He proposed that his University was ready to fund research projects in many fields that had shared interest for both neighbouring countries. He said universities of the two nations should set up joint research institutes in the universities located on each other’s soil.

The SMIU VC expressed that his University was ready to be involved in mutually conducted research projects and provide funds equal to its Chinese counterpart. He said the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan had already allocated US$1 billion for universities, besides the provincial government was generously supporting SMIU for its research endeavours.

“With China emerging as the world’s economic powerhouse, along with other aspects, it had been concentrating on construction of trade routes and Pakistan should benefit from the opportunity owing to its brotherly relations with the Asian giant.”

He added that although there were problems in development of CPEC, it was economically advantageous for both countries, yet certain social problems were bound to emerge later: “China and Pakistan should collaborate to address those issues. The communication gap between the two countries could be removed by learning of national and regional languages of China and Pakistan.”