‘Centre to blame as varsities yet to get funds’

Karachi

The 18th Amendment redefined the role of provinces, but since its passage in April 2011, the federal education ministry and Higher Education Commission (HEC) were still functional in some form. To date , however, the transfer of powers from the federal government has not been completed in its true spirit, the provincial finance secretary, Sohail Rajput, said on Thursday.

Addressing a seminar entitled, 'Strategy of Provincial Budget', organised by the Department of Economics of Karachi University at the varsity's arts auditorium, Rajput informed the audience that the federal government has still not released the allotted funds to the provincial governments for the public sector varsities and this is why the Sindh government was not able to release the grants to the varsities.

He said the provincial government has released Rs100 million to each 19 public sector university from the allocated Rs5 billion.

“Soon a mechanism with respect to varsity’s students’ strength and research performance will be devised by the government and University of Karachi would be on top of the list due to its extensive research output and being the biggest public sector university,” Rajput said. 

He further said the economic performance of the Sindh government is far better than the other provincial governments. According to him the federal government gets the 80 percent share of the tax collection while provincial governments get only 20 percent and Sindh government is the only provincial government that meets the tax revenue target of 20 percent.

He added the provincial government has 40 departments in which finance department is the most important department that looks after the administration of the public revenue.

“Provincial governments have now got the conditional permission of getting loans from the international monetary bodies which will tend to strengthen the provincial economies.”