Universities should collect hides of sacrificial animals to meet financial crisis

Islamabad:On every Eidul Azha, there is a rat race for collecting skins of sacrificial animals for fund raising by different outfits in the name of public service, philanthropy and religion. There are genuine claimants for hides like Edhi Foundation, Anjuman Faiz-ul-Islam, Rawalpindi Eye Donors Organisation and the people you personally know are deserving. However, there are political parties like Jamat-e-Islami and MQM, Jehadi outfits etc also claiming right on animal skins.

Unesco advocates for allocating at least 4% of GDP to education. We allocate less than 1.5%. The ill-advised policies of Planning Commission, incompetence of Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education and lethargy of Higher Education Commission have created another sector seemingly more deserving for ‘qurbani ki khalen’ (hides). And this is the higher education.

I was amused to get an interesting proposal from Dr Anwar Iqbal Shaheen, a retired professor of Quaid-i-Azam University. Incidentally, during his student days, he was affiliated to an outfit having stakes in skins of animals slaughtered on this Eid. “People are appealed to donate skins of sacrificial animals this time to QAU so that it can pay full salary to its staff,” landed the suggestion on my social media account.

The logic behind this appeal for a public sector seat of higher learning and research is freezing of recurring grants of all government-funded universities to 2018 level by the Government of Pakistan. Salary and pension to serving and retired faculty, researchers and other employees are exclusively paid from the recurring grant.

One issue is annual increment in the salary package of every staff. How to arrange extra funds to pay increment if recurring grant is frozen? But icing on the case is the increases in salary and pension by Imran to Kakar to Shahbaz governments without correspondingly increasing the recurring grant.

To meet the shortfall, the hapless universities including the No 1, QAU, are forced to exorbitantly raise the fees thereby closing the doors of education to the wards of lower-, even upper-middle class beyond Intermediate. Poor class does not figure in the discussion here. Finding this not sufficient, universities usually do not recruit a replacement when a staffer retires, resigns or dies. The amount thus saved may help universities to meet some pressure on recurring grant deficit. At times even teacher seats are kept vacant and services of visiting faculty are hired at much lower rates which are not paid for semesters, even years. For example, QAU has yet to pay visiting faculty for the courses it taught in Spring 2023.

Another trick is to increase enrolment giving a damn to teacher-student ratio, pressure on labs, libraries, classroom capacity and hostel accommodation.

What is impact on standards or quality of education is none of the business of university administrations. This state of affairs leads to student strikes and at times closure of universities even for weeks.

The only silver lining is saving on electricity and fuel bills due to closures which QAU sometimes resorts to without student unrest like winter vacation never heard of in its history. Money at times is also siphoned from development funds to meet salary expenses.

Three months ago, the QAU had to borrow from a bank on interest to pay salary and pension which it could not fully return so far. Now that Eid has passed, QAU could only partially pay salary for the month of May to its staff and no pension at all. What will happen next month, only the relevant Ministers, HEC chairperson or the VC know. Do they?

Education is victim of misplaced priorities. In this situation, the proposal of Dr Shaheen has come as a ray of hope out of blue moon. Is it not a bad idea for the VC for obvious reasons? Rather all VCs should start campaigns from this year to collect sacrificial animals’ skins to partially meet their growing expenses.

What do you say Ahsan Iqbal, our planning wizard, in this respect! You like to be called a Professor. ‘Qadam barhao’ and help the professors across the country in this ‘kar-i-khair.’