STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

Dr. Zahid Ayub is the President of Isotherm, Inc., which is a manufacturer of heat transfer equipment in Arlington, TX. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Texas-Arlington and is a Technology Editor for the International Journal of Enhanced Heat Transfer. Among the honors Dr. Ayub has received are the Michigan New Product Award, ASHRAE Distinguished Service Award and ASHRAE Research Service Award. Dr. Ayub is also a Fellow of ASME and ASHRAE.

Seafood export from Pakistan to European Union (EU) countries was banned in early April 2007, after an EU team visited the Karachi and Korangi fish harbors to investigate quality standards at the fisheries facilities. Earlier, during a February 2005 trip, the EU team warned the Pakistani authorities about sub-standard quality at the harbors. This ban on all fish imports from Pakistan to the EU has resulted in a multi-million dollars loss. As quality standards normalize across the globe, the standard of quality in Pakistan’s fisheries could potentially cost millions more in revenue in coming years.

Fish rotting under the sun at local fisheries

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A new program funded by USAID, called Pre-STEP (Pre-Service Teachers Education Program), was launched on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009, to improve the quality of education in Punjab. The $75 million initiative involves Punjab’s Ministry of Education, the Higher Education Commission, and the Federal Ministry of Education. [Note: STEP is not affiliated with this program] Read the rest of this entry »

Editors Note: Dr. Tauseef Aized is a professor at the University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Lahore and a research fellow at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of STEP.

With the advent of the industrial revolution, the traditional role of higher learning institutions has been transformed from simply educating young people to creating and disseminating knowledge to the whole society. Every higher education institution needs enormous financial resources that, in our system, are typically provided through public funding. The state demands a return on its investment beyond traditional manpower development. Read the rest of this entry »

Pakistan has been rated a ‘Rising Star’ in research multiple times over the last couple of years by ScienceWatch.com, a Thompson Reuters website which tracks trends and performance in research by analyzing its database of scientific papers and citations. The ‘Rising Star’ rankings are published every two months to acknowledge new entrants, by identifying the scientists, institutions, countries, and journals which have shown the largest percentage increase in total citations.  In the May issue of the ratings, Pakistan was named a ‘rising star’ in two areas, ‘Materials Science’ and ‘Plant & Animal Science’. Read the rest of this entry »

Sana Fatima, a student of Lahore University of Management Sciences, recently visited two primary schools in the District of Kasur, where she witnessed first-hand the plight of children in the public education system of Pakistan. The following is a pictorial account of her visit.

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Editor’s Note: Since the establishment of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002, the higher education sector in Pakistan has undergone a transformation both in its size and its nature. Dr. Sohail Naqvi, the Executive Director of the HEC, has been at the helm of many of these changes. STEP’s student editor Mariyam Khalid recently sat down with Dr. Naqvi to learn more about the HEC and its mandate. In the second of this two part interview, the scope of the HEC’s mandate and its policy-making procedures are discussed. The interview concludes with Dr. Naqvi’s vision for the future of the HEC.

STEP: Do you think that the HEC has taken too much on its plate? It is directly involved in curriculum setting, hiring and firing professors, setting up distance education classrooms, and even assessing universities. Should the HEC delegate some of these tasks?

SN: We definitely should delegate some of these tasks and we are now actively involved in trying to distance ourselves from institutions of programs. Earlier, we got involved with so many of these things because nobody was doing them nor did we have any mechanism for them, for example, foreign faculty hiring. Actually, Faculty hiring should be done by universities as per best practices, where the universities themselves identify the qualified personnel, negotiate their salaries, and provide them incentives to join the faculty. Universities are fully capable of doing that but they were not doing it. Which is why we had to get involved in the execution of a lot of programs. The scholarship program is another example that comes to mind. But we are now shifting our focus. For example, we are shifting the scholarship program so that it now needs to be run by the universities as per best practices. So there was a need to build the capacities of the universities to perform best practices and have good governance. There are other small sized agencies that are not doing enough and are not widespread enough. For example, the HEC has not been involved in the domain of colleges at the moment, and we are criticized on various forums that we should be. But it is a capacity issue; the HEC can only do so much. It is an evolving organization as any living organization has to be. We took on the tasks that nobody else had done before. There were things we needed to do ourselves to get things started. We have designed a lot of these things so that they would start moving at an arm’s length over time and ultimately become independent entities away from the HEC. So the answer to your question is that yes, we could delegate but at times we need to build the organization to which we can delegate.

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The vast majority of Pakistanis using the web are familiar only with English keyboards. Creating content in Urdu script is a slow and frustrating experience, as it requires either learning the Urdu keyboard layout, which is forced onto a keyboard designed for writing English, or using on-screen keyboards, which are useful but limited by the speed at which one can click the mouse. As a result, producing online content in Urdu script has mostly been limited to a small number of bloggers and commercial websites. For most users, writing Urdu using Roman script (transliteration) has become the main way of writing Urdu on computers. Transliteration is a technique that is used to do phonetic mapping of words written in one script (e.g. Arabic) to another script (e.g. Roman). For example, شکریہ transliterates into shukriya. While using Roman transliteration may be adequate for a lot of purposes (chatting), it leaves a lot to be desired from the perspective of people who prefer to read and write the language in its original script.

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Yesterday, The News International ran a four page special on ROZEE.PK,  Pakistan’s (self-proclaimed) #1 job website. Their Campus Career Portal Initiative, a project started by ROZEE.PK to link the academia and the industry in Pakistan, in particular caught my eye. This project is being funded by the National ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) R&D Fund under the Ministry of Information Technology. The proposal for this project introduces the project as follows (the complete proposal is available here):

“The Campus Career Portal Initiative proposes an efficient, scalable, and distributed system of matching students, academia and industry to achieve industry-funded research projects and industry demand recruitment. It will also generate invaluable statistics, and effectively match graduates within their respective industries with pinpoint accuracy.”

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Editor’s Note: Since the establishment of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002, the higher education sector in Pakistan has undergone a transformation both in its size and its nature. Dr. Sohail Naqvi, the Executive Director of the HEC, has been at the helm of many of these changes. STEP’s student editor Mariyam Khalid recently sat down with Dr. Naqvi to learn more about the HEC and its mandate. In the first of this two-part interview, the performance of the HEC, the local relevance of research and other key issues regarding research in Pakistan are examined.

STEP: You have worked as a professor, as a dean, as an industrial entrepreneur and now as a policy-maker in the government. Which of these roles did you find the most rewarding?

SN: I find the one that I’m doing now the most rewarding because of its ability to influence so many factors pertaining to education in Pakistan. But I do miss the university environment, especially the interaction with students. I’ve always loved teaching and being in the classroom. In fact, I sometimes catch myself talking to my colleagues as if I’m lecturing them! So that’s definitely something that I do miss. There is a freedom in being a professor that is simply not available in any other job. When I’ve had it with administration, I can always go back to being a professor. Read the rest of this entry »