STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

The Higher Education Commission’s recent efforts to increase the research output of Pakistani universities has resulted in an increasing number of publications in reputed journals and conferences (a comparison of recent research output of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India is available here). However, this success has also been accompanied with increasing instances of plagiarism involving Pakistani Professors and students. HEC deserves praise for its swift and strict  response to these cases.

In the last couple of years, a number of online services and software have become available for plagiarism detection. An evaluation of available anti-plagiarism services conducted by the Claremont McKenna College is available online. However, till now,  the subject of plagiarism and its automatic detection was not systematically studied by the academia itself. This has finally changed, with the announcement of the first  “International Competition on Plagiarism Detection“. The competition carries a prize of 500 Euros, and will be hosted by the PAN workshop under the Annual Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing 2009.

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A vast majority of graduates from Pakistani industry goes on to serve the local industry. Right from the day of the first interview, many of them are presented with the reality that their four years of undergraduate learning does not help with the prospective job responsibilities. After landing a job, they have to learn the ropes by going through orientation and probation periods while earning meager salaries. Only after this, often humbling experience, are they transformed into a practicing professional and able to get promotions or avail employment opportunities elsewhere with higher salaries or better job description. The industry is not happy with the curriculum being taught at the academic institutes, and about the lack of proper career counseling to students which would encourage them to have a more stable career path. The academia blames the professionals for not coming forward to contribute in teaching. They also bring up the lack of industry support in  providing internships and senior project supports which could minimize the need of post-graduate training during the orientation/probation periods and allow students to be ready to take the real-world challenges from the day of graduation. Both parties have a valid argument but these discussions are mostly limited at pointing out the other party’s faults, instead of finding out solutions and identifying action items for each party.

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This Frontline short documentary reported by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy examines the impact of the Taliban in Pakistan “out of the mouths of babes.” The narrative is highly engaging and is a searing indictment of the Taliban. The documentary makes an interesting statement on the battle against the Taliban: it is as much for the minds of the future citizenry of Pakistan as it is for square footage of land.

The swelling refugee camps of internally displaced people squeezed from their homes by US drone attacks, and faultlines between the Pakistan Army and the advancing Taliban are also examined. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre places the number of these refugees at upto 900,000 people, near half of whom may be children; out of their homes, and out of school.

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House Resolution 1886, known as the Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement PEACE act, introduced on April 2^nd, 2009 by Rep. Howard Berman authorizes President Obama to dramatically increase non-military assistance to Pakistan – $1.5 billion a year for five years. The scope of the act includes strengthening democratic, judicial, and government institutions, support for public education, the establishment of a human rights commission, healthcare development and cultural and educational programs. This is the House version of the Kerry-Lugar Bill, currently referred to committee; it still has to be voted in the House and in the Senate before reaching the President.

This bill constitutes the clearest articulation yet of the direction the United States wishes to see Pakistani civil society take. It reflects an understanding on the part of the US leadership that the military engagement of the Pakistan army is just one of many fronts that the battle against the Taliban is being waged. Education takes a central role in the bill, requiring the regulation of madrassas (enforcing existing Pakistani law) and advocating the development of a comprehensive national curriculum, framed on “modern” principles, particularly in FATA. The bill highlights a number of urgent national educational needs including women’s literacy (current adult literacy rate of females as a percentage of males is 59%, among the largest differentials in the world [3]), increasing teacher salaries and training, and linking education more closely with employment. In Section 102, the details of public education reform are outlined:

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A recent paper by Dr Asim Khwaja (Harvard) and Dr Atif Mian (U of Chicago), with graduate student Prashant Bharadwaj, is an excellent example of quantitative social science research on a locally relevant issue. Titled “The Big March: Migratory Flows After the Partition of India”, the paper analyzes archival records to answer questions about the volume of people who migrated to India or Pakistan at the time of the partition in 1947.

This is a controversial topic, to say the least. Estimates of those who died in the process vary significantly across sources, especially depending on the national or religious affiliations of the source. More importantly, there have hardly been any scientific studies of perhaps the most significant event in the history of the subcontinent.

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An interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor recently caught my eye, discussing anti-Indian bias in official textbooks in Pakistan. Two contrasting view-points are presented.

According to Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, the “Islamizing” of Pakistan’s schools began in 1976 under the rule of the former dictator, the general Zia ul-Haq.

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