Throughout my life I have hated mathematics with a passion. I hated its rules and notations. I hated the fact that I had absolutely no say in whatever was going on in the class. I just had to sit there and listen to my math teacher go on and on about formulas, notations needed to write these formulas, practice questions which would help us memorize these formulas and eventually “practical problems” which were supposed to exhibit the relevance of these formulas in everyday life although even the eight year-old me could tell that these were merely the same practice questions loosely disguised in the most unlikely of social situations known to man. And frankly, I didn’t care. I didn’t care where x was, or how much older Mary was than her brother Mark or when train A would reach London. As far as I was concerned math was an obsolete science to which I didn’t want to contribute to and which, for the most part, didn’t really want me to contribute to it anyway.

Therefore it comes as a surprise to many people that I am currently a Computer Science major focusing on theoretical computer science, which is basically a branch of mathematics. I, who had once famously given a speech to my seventh-grade math class about the pointlessness of mathematics, am now the one trying to explain to other people the beauty of Erdos’ brilliant proofs. And it all started with the following beautiful proof of the infinity of prime numbers:

For any finite set  {p_1,p₂…p_r} of primes consider the number n= p_1..p_2..p₃…p_r +1. This n has a prime divisor p but this is not one of the {p_1,p₂…p_r}, otherwise p would be a divisor of n and the product  p_1..p_2..p₃…p_{r ,} and thus also of the difference n-( p_1..p_2..p₃…p_r) =1, which is impossible.  So a finite set {p_1,p₂…p_r} cannot be the collection of all prime numbers.

I first heard of this proof in the first lecture of a discrete mathematics course I took during my sophomore year at university. The instructor didn’t even write the proof down, with all its messy set notation. He just told us about the idea of putting the prime numbers together in a group and showed us what goes wrong if we assume the group to be finite. At first I thought this was one of those introductory shenanigans professors deploy in the first class to get students interested. How could something so simple be counted as math? Where were the fancy symbols and the list of variables with their definitions? Where was the list of steps used to reach the conclusion? Where were the ten similar questions I needed to solve at home for practice? This was simply a clever idea used to solve a problem. Surely, this couldn’t be math! But, as I have learnt in the past year, this is basically what math is: a set of simple ideas used to solve problems. Sometimes the problems can be simplified to older problems for which people have already come up with solutions. Sometimes ideas which have been used to solve a certain problem can be used to solve an unrelated problem. But the simplicity of the process remains intact. It is the ‘idea’ which is at the heart of all mathematics, and to come up with ideas you just need creativity (and maybe a pencil and a notebook).

If a course can change the path of a person’s life, then this discrete math course changed mine. In the course of nine weeks, I was introduced to the kind of math I hadn’t even known existed. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like a robot while doing math. I actually had to think about the problems and figure out strategies for solving them. While I was introduced to techniques like induction and graph theory, for the most part my assignments and exams required me to come up with my own strategies based on these techniques and my own logical arguments and common sense. Math was like an elaborate game and finally I felt like it actually wanted me to take part.

So, this brings us to the central question: why did I, and countless other students, hate elementary and high school math? What needs to be done to make mathematics more interesting to students? Although I do not have any experience teaching mathematics, I do remember the reasons why I hated it so much and know exactly what eventually made me realize that I wanted to study a branch of mathematics as my major. For the sake of this article, I am going to ignore factors which affect all subjects alike and focus on why math has become such a hated subject.

Looking back at my years of struggling with high school math the first word that comes to mind is boredom. And this was not caused by a lack of interest in school because I was generally a very enthusiastic kid. I loved studying languages, history, and science. It was just math that I dreaded. And looking back at the way math is taught it comes as no surprise. While all other subjects are taught as an amalgamation of the history, foundations, rules and applications of the subject, math is mainly limited to the rules of the subject. Take a typical sixth grade science class. I remember learning about the effect of different factors on the rate of evaporation by placing different shaped beakers filled with water all over the school campus. What followed was a memorable class in which we all had mock “evaporation races” as we timed the beakers to see which one would lose its water first.It was only once we had made our own conclusions about which factors affected evaporation, that our teacher explained Brownian motion to us. She also mentioned factors such as surface area and wind-speed, which most of us had been able  to conclude for ourselves based on the observations we had made.

Now compare this to a typical sixth grade math class. Looking back, sixth grade was when some of the most wonderful mathematical concepts were introduced to us. It was in the sixth grade that we first encountered the idea of a variable and started to really analyze shapes. Statistics was introduced, and we started manipulating probabilities to get results which even now give me the feeling of being able to predict the future. But in the midst of all these amazing ideas, this is how a typical math class would go:

Teacher: An isosceles triangle is a triangle which has two sides of equal length. Okay?

Students: YES!

Teacher: So what is an isosceles triangle?

Students: A TRIANGLE WHICH HAS TWO SIDES OF EQUAL LENGTH !

And you can bet one of the questions on the progress test would be: “What is an isosceles triangle?”. In such a situation who would be interested in math? And these are not just two extreme examples I have mentioned to prove my point. Science that year continued to keep us hooked: we grew plants in inky water, caught insects in jars, experimented with mirrors and discovered the material we were supposed to learn, while in math we moved on to triangles which had no sides of equal length (I honestly don’t remember what they were called, though I think it begins with an s) and other lexical atrocities.

You may argue that science is an extreme example and that math just doesn’t have the exciting material needed to keep students hooked. While science teachers can use models, take their students outside or perform simple experiments to demonstrate their material, math teachers have nothing to interest a group of thirty kids. Not only do I disagree with this, I actually claim that it is the other way round and that it is the math teachers that have it good. While science teachers need extensive (and often non-available) funding to buy lab equipment and take their students out on field trips, all a math teacher needs are thirty pencils and notebooks. And how does he keep them interested? Well, he actually asks them to do some math. Do you remember the puzzle we probably all tried as kids in which we had to draw a house without lifting our pencils. That is just a simple example of a Eulerian path. And those complicated strategies for winning card games that our older siblings tried to explain to us were mostly simple applications of probability. The tower of rings of increasingly small diameters which we had to shift to another peg is the most common example given for recursive algorithms. The list of interesting mathematical problems which we solved willingly as kids is endless. Nim, Hex, magic tricks, and riddles in which we had to find loopholes in logical arguments are all example of the math we enjoyed as children and it is these problems which should be bought to the classroom to make math classes more interesting.

Another issue which I find with the way mathematics is taught, which is closely related to the first, is the extreme and almost exclusive emphasis on the utterly mundane aspects of mathematics. Take the isosceles triangle example above. Would it really have mattered if we had called the triangles, “triangles with two equal sides”? Maybe shortened to TWTES (pronounced tevtes). What’s important are the properties of these triangles. Instead of asking a child to spend time trying to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of this weird word, she should be asked to think about how they are made, and how the angles inside this triangle are related to each other. I am pretty sure if a child made a dozen different TWTES’ she would figure out most of their  properties for herself and she would actually enjoy the mental excursion of discovering these properties instead of hastily be given a list of them in the last fifteen minutes of class.

Admittedly, there are some terms and jargon that a student of mathematics must learn in order for the classes to be held smoothly and for the students to eventually take part in the wider mathematical discourse. But no other subject puts even half of the emphasis that math places on its lexicon. Take the example of chemistry. If a subject has the right to focus on terminology it is chemistry, with it’s multitude of  symbols, chemical formulas and specific reactions. But not once do I remember a chemistry teacher reciting the names of the elements along with their atomic symbols. Instead, we focused on the elements and their reactions and any time we needed help deciphering a symbol we could simply look it up on the huge periodic table taped to the classroom wall. Maybe that is what mathematics needs: a periodic table of shapes and functions which would be taped to the wall of every classroom. Then, children all over the world could forget about mathematical terminology and actually do some math.

And by ‘doing math’ I don’t mean the mindless repetition, or solving exercise problems at the end of every chapter. As a result of school mathematics, most people end up believing math is the application of known rules to problems that we know the rules can solve. That is the job of an accountant or a cashier or an insurance planner. A mathematicians  job is much simpler. He must come up with the rules that other people are to use. When faced with a problem, he is not told that it can be solved using the second trigonometric identity; that is what he must figure out. And while this is harder than simply applying a set of rules, the result of coming up with a solution is infinitely more rewarding. You can compare the two as the difference between the joy a child feels in having an adult place him on a bike and push him along, and the joy he feels when he races through the park himself. It is hard to teach him how to ride and it might take him ages to learn but all parents understand that the end result is worth it. Math teachers should definitely do the same with their students.

And if difficulty was such a major barrier, why doesn’t it stop teachers of other subjects from trying to get their students to appreciate the beauty of their fields? By the end of high school most of us have faced the toughest aspects of most of the other subjects. We have read Iqbal’s poetry and critiqued it with our peers. We have a deep understanding of how the major systems of the body work. We have built electrical devices and have made original pieces of art in a range of different mediums. Then, why is it that most of us only experience the joy of coming up with a true mathematical proof well into our undergraduate programs? Surely there is something wrong going on here.

The talks will be aimed at a general audience. Undergraduate and graduate students with non-engineering backgrounds are also encouraged to attend.

Title: Technology Blogging and Entrepreneurship

Where: LUMS Department of Computer Science, Saeed  Saigol Auditorium .
When: Sunday, February 7, 8:00am Pakistan Standard Time

Abstract:

Whether you want to blog as a professional, grow in your current job, start a technology company, or even influence policy — effective blogging and know-how about blogosphere can play a critical role in your success. This talk will primarily look at blogging as a career and blogging as a means to entrepreneurship. I will discuss what you need to do to be a successful technology blogger and how you can use blogging to start and sell your business

Bio:

Saad Fazil does freelance writing for VentureBeat, where he focuses on deep analysis of emerging trends in the industry. He is the founder of Whizner Consulting, a technology strategy consulting firm. Prior to consulting, he held business analyst, product management, and sales consultant positions at Kayak.com, Oracle, and Alcatel. He received his MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. He blogs at IT Valley and tweets at @sfrocks.

Where: LUMS Department of Computer Science,  Saeed Saigol Auditorium.
When: Sunday, February 7, 9:00am Pakistan Standard Time

Abstract: 

Games will be the most prevalent medium of the 21st Century – more than radio, film, and television combined in the 20th. So as leaders in this medium, what do you hope to accomplish, and how can you get there?  In this talk, Kellee Santiago (President & Co-Founder) will discuss thatgamecompany‘s approach to developing innovative games, and will explain why they hope that all of you will join them in doing so. She will walk through TGC’s process from first approaching a concept through prototyping and execution, taking examples from their previous PSN release, “Flower.”

Bio:

Kellee Santiago is President and Co-Founder of thatgamecompany (TGC). TGC’s goal is to make video games that communicate different emotional experiences, and expand the communicative possibilities of games. Kellee graduated from the MFA Interactive Media program at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts where her research focused on game design, interactive narrative, and physical and gestural interfaces for digital media. While at USC she teamed up with fellow student Jenova Chen to develop the student-created game, “Cloud.” The game went on to become critically acclaimed, after which the two decided to found their own studio, thatgamecompany, and landed a three game deal with Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. to develop downloadable games for Playstation Network. Their first two commercial releases, “flOw”, and “Flower,” went on to become award-winning and two of the top downloaded games on PSN.

Kellee is also a TED2010 Fellow.

We posed these and some other questions to Sara Chak, a Developmental Therapist working in the Developmental Pediatrics Department at the Children’s Hospital, Lahore. Sara has a Masters in Special Education from Punjab University and has been working with special children for the last six years. Currently, she works with the parents or guardians of children with special needs.

STEP:The Special Education system relies on the detection of disabilities in infants and young children. In Pakistan, how advanced is the system of detection of disabilities which would lead a child to be described as having special needs?

Sara Chak: Most disabilities such as Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, bone defects, and epilepsy are identified at birth and most hospitals in Pakistan currently have an advanced system of assessing newborns for these conditions. Some disabilities, such as visual and hearing impairments, are diagnosed later on in the child’s life, but again the pediatric departments of most hospitals have the resources to perform tests to diagnose these disabilities. The problem, of course, lies in the fact that most children in Pakistan, are not born in hospitals. Traditional midwives are unable to assess newborns for theses disabilities and thus their detection is delayed, sometimes indefinitely.
One area of assessment where Pakistan lags behind is the psychological testing of those with visual or hearing impairments. Currently no institution in Pakistan currently provides tests for the intellectual assessment of these students, which hinders the academic progress of these children.

STEP: What is the next step taken once a child with special needs has been identified?

SC: This depends on the institution the child is taken to by his or her guardians and the recommendations of those they consult, usually the doctor who diagnosed the disability. Here at the Children’s hospital we have two learning centers: the two-hour learning center and the four-hour learning center. The two-hour learning center is mostly for children under the age of five, where each child is taught on a one-on-one basis. Apart from teaching the child, the teacher focuses on preparing the child to work in a group environment. In the four hour learning center, group teaching sessions take place everyday. These are continued as long as we feel that the child is benefiting from them. Once we feel that the child has reached his or her learning potential, we guide him/her through an occupational placement program. In this process, we help the child figure out a skill he or she would like to learn and one which we think the child is capable of doing. We refer him/her to vocational training institutes for people with special needs. Thus our aim is to make him/her an independent member of the society.

STEP: What kinds of jobs do these children usually end up with?

SC: All kinds. Traditionally, they went to vocational training centers to learn embroidery, woodwork, etc. But, recently two of my students trained to work at fast food restaurants and are currently working as part of the service staff at these restaurants.

STEP:Which other institutions are currently providing Special Education?

SC: Currently there is mixture of institutions. There are government-run institutions, non-governmental charity organizations, and private institutions. But the number of such institutions is not enough to cater to the demand. And these institutions are usually concentrated in the urban centers of Pakistan.

STEP:What major changes do you think are required in the Special Education sector?

SC: Firstly, I think the training of special education teachers needs to be altered. Currently in Pakistan the only degree offered in Special Education is a Masters degree. No other degree or diploma even has Special Education in its syllabus. In my opinion, Special Education should be introduced as a subject as early as possible. In other countries it is offered as a high-school level subject. For example, Special Education is an O-Level subject but this is not offered to students in Pakistan. The B.Ed degree that most teachers have should certainly require that the holder have some training in dealing with special children. A two-year course is not enough for a person to learn the intricacies of dealing with these children and making special education part of the B.Ed degree would increase the pool of teachers available to teach at Special Education institutions. In fact, if the society as a whole is to learn to accept and include those with special needs, we need to introduce the concept of special needs to children at a primary or secondary school level.

The Masters degree itself needs to be extended to a three year program and should include a year long mandatory internship. Currently, this internship is only a few months long and in my opinion this just isn’t enough. Teaching Special children is a skill best learned in an actual school, and thus greater on-field experience is needed to improve the quality of the graduates.

Secondly the institutions themselves need some changes in the way they are run. It is sad to see when the government offers excellent resources for Special Education but nobody knows how to use them. An example of this is the automatic Braille translation machine. Many institutions have them but they are not being used to their maximum potential. While they could be used to automatically translate large amounts of important material, very few people know how to use them leading them to be used marginally for manually translating text. Teachers are not taught how to operate them, it is a mechanics job to do so. Thus either teachers should be trained how to use these resources or trained personnel should be available to them.

Teachers themselves should pass through a vigorous screening procedure. Due to the mentioned lack of training in special education, most teachers in these schools have no experience or qualifications in teaching Special Children. Thus they have very little knowledge of their physical, psychological, or emotional needs. Another change which is happening on a global level but will take time to be implemented in Pakistan is the elimination of Special Education institutions altogether. Mainstreaming has almost completely replaced Special Education institutions in the developed world. Laws are in place which allow no school to reject a student on the basis of a disability. This way every school has to be prepared to handle a child with special needs. The structure of the schools needs to be such that allows special children to maneuver easily, they have teachers trained to deal with these children and other resources such as special computers and books are available in all schools. The idea of isolating these children is no longer morally or socially acceptable.

STEP: Could you elaborate on the concept of mainstreaming. Has this been adopted by schools in Pakistan?

SC: Mainstreaming defies the idea that children with special needs need to be segregated from other children. There are many benefits that come with doing this. First of all the special child does not feel isolated from the society. This makes it easier for them to become contributing members of the society. By segregating these children we only encourage their role as social outcasts. At this point, some private schools do admit children with special needs but in my experience, the facilities they have are far from satisfactory. They usually allocate a separate room for these children which nullifies the purpose of mainstreaming altogether.

STEP: An advantage of mainstreaming would be the wider acceptance of people with physical or mental disabilities in society. How far do you think the lack of this acceptance is a problem currently?

SC: This is a huge problem in Pakistan. As a therapist, I deal with special children everyday who are intentionally or unintentionally hurt by strangers, peers, and even their own family members. For example, those with visual or hearing impairments are often dealt with as if they have a mental disability, hampering their academic and social development. Even family members are guilty of ridiculing these children. A common example is that of children with Down Syndrome. They are often highly excited by music and can’t help moving enthusiastically when music is played. Family members will use this “trick” to entertain themselves and play music at odd times knowing the child will not be able to restrain himself from dancing. This ridicule has deep repercussions on the child’s development. We need to become mature as a society and learn how to deal with those with special needs in an accepting and respectful manner.

STEP:What are the opportunities available to people with special needs in higher education?

SC: Most universities do not discriminate against applicants because of their disabilities. I know for a fact that there are students with disabilities studying in GCU and FC College. But the number of such students is few. You have to understand that even though there are opportunities available to students to gain higher education, very few have access to good quality primary and secondary education which would make them eligible for higher education.

STEP: Ending on a positive note, could you mention some of the success stories of Special Education in Pakistan?

SC: A major positive step taken by the Musharraf government was to open the CSS examinations to those with special needs. They were allowed assistance in the examination and thus the civil service has now been opened to these people. This is a major step in the right direction since it proves that with the right assistance, those with special needs can be as contributing members of society as those without.

Rising Sun Institute, LRBT, Children’s Hospital are examples of special education institutes that are making a difference. STEP would like to laud their efforts and encourage readers to contribute to institutions like these which are providing education and training to those with special needs in any way they can.

LUMS has been shut down for a week. And as I said to a friend, maybe it’s a good thing. Because we, the ones at LUMS, are so disconnected from Pakistan, that it had to take the death of seven students, seven of our people, to make us pause our movies and type google news instead of facebook in our urls. Because with the divide between classes here, it’s as if Pakistan is two countries; one where all the news comes from, bombs, stampedes at ration lines, acid attacks, rapes and one where LUMS is, where people (even a few crazy women) can walk the clean quiet streets of defence and cantt, where people dine in every increasing style, where the only effects of terrorism are a few tiresome roadblocks and the echos of blasts far far away. Terrorism has reached our country now and we are slightly disturbed at it.

So finally the budding intellectuals of Pakistan have turned their attention to this problem that they had heard about but never really experienced before this. But this turned out to be a problematic exercise for me. Ask me what I want to see in this country. And I can flood your ears with concepts such as pluralism, freedom, justice, democracy, even anarchism in the style of Noam Chomsky. But ask me, “how do you get to there, from here?” And I am mute. And my hands drop uselessly to my sides. Or rather, they go up and cover my eyes because there is no point of sight when you can’t move.

My philosophy won’t work here because I know what I want but I have no way to make it happen.

I want these killings to end. I want the discourse to become more nuanced than “Islamic terrorism”. I want people to realize that all Muslims aren’t killers and that to say so, even as a joke, is to open the door to a dangerous generalization. I want Muslims to be able to criticize Israel on it’s war crimes without being attacked as fundamentalists. I want Muslims to stop defending what’s happening in our country and stop using conspiracy theories to deflect blame onto the US and its cronies. I want things to become less simplistic. But it can’t happen. Because there are certain interests for USA in creating the image of a Muslim terrorist. Because there is a certain complacency in the Muslim attribution of blame to the west. We all want to blame someone because then the responsibility to fix the problem is placed on whoever is blamed. And man is inherently lazy.

I want the people of Pakistan to be united. But for so many groups with so many nationalist claims to unite under one banner or one leader or even one party is impossible.

I want Pakistan to be partitioned into it’s four provinces. But for that to take place without bloodshed is a myth unheard of in our part of the World. And then there is the problem of our geographical location. A problem that we refer to with a mixture of pride and sorrow. The problem is that we are essential to too many interests. We are a troublesome neighbor to far too many important countries for those interests to allow us to divide for internal peace. Better a war ridden Pakistan than four small states who don’t border all those territories that actually matter to the World.

I want us to not think in terms of nationalism and patriotism. Because what use are these constructs? Why is a fellow Pakistani worth anymore than someone who just happens to be born in Iran or India? Why can’t we cherish human life and human development regardless of which boundary it occurs in? We cannot because such trajectories of thinking have never been offered to us. We cannot because if every Pakistani began to think of him or herself as an individual and began to work for their own benefit, all Pakistan would get is a slap from the invisible hand. Individualism abroad means greater progress because there are structures in which that individualism is exercised. Here, individualism is destruction. It is individualism that makes so many LUMS students rejoice that our university has closed in the middle of exams, because they hadn’t studied and would have scored “below the mean” in a course. Yes, there are Pakistanis who are rejoicing in this moment.

I want such Pakistanis, all Pakistanis to realize what it means to be at war. I want us to work. Ceaselessly. Because work alone can produce results and yes, it might be a Western concept to cherish work oh-so-much instead of sipping tea with the family but I want us to realize that tea and drawing room chats won’t do anything for us. But we can’t. Because when we go to school we die; when we talk out loud, we disappear; when we write, they write back threats. And why should we work? Why should we bother, sitting in our generator powered homes, surfing the net on our shiny laptops, going to cafes and stealing kisses on campus? Of course the greatest issue for LUMS to consider is kissing on campus. Of course. Because what effect does Pakistan’s appalling Gender Equity Index ratings have on a campus where women make up nearly half the student body? What effect do rising food prices have for us, with our regulated cafeteria prices?

So maybe it is good that LUMS has shut down for a week. But will this week change anything, I wonder? An essay here, a comment there. And this week will pass. And the rat race within LUMS will begin again. And you and I, as rational actors, will realize that nothing we do can help Pakistan and we should simply help ourselves by burying our heads in our imported traditions, getting the grades and rushing abroad the first chance we get.

I want things to change. But they won’t. Because we are stuck, you and I and scores like us. And I don’t know how we can get unstuck.

The overarching goal of CRULP is to develop local language processing technologies to provide people easy access to information regardless of the local language they speak. The traditional approaches to introducing technology into rural areas have involved providing schools and colleges with computers and expecting the locals to learn and adapt to modern technology. Dr. Hussein sees a fundamental flaw in this approach, in that they either fail to address or underestimate the two major barriers people face in using modern technology: illiteracy and language. With 45% of the population illiterate and most people unable to interact in English, it is impractical to expect them to use computers to access information through current technology. The team at CRULP aims to break the illiteracy barrier by developing Urdu Speech Recognition systems and Text to Speech systems to allow users to operate technology vocally. The language barriers are being tackled through the development of software in Urdu, examples of which include the SeaMonkey internet suite that provides users Urdu-based tools to make websites, surf the internet, email etc.

A snapshot of the SeaMonkey browser

When asked about the decline of the use of Urdu and the increasing use of English in the modern Pakistani society, Dr. Hussain replied that this phenomena is limited in scope and is not representative of the general Pakistani population. While the urban elite may see a decline of Urdu in their immediate social circle, the truth is that the majority of the population still interacts solely in Urdu and other local languages. This can be seen most readily in the circulation of newspapers: if you calculate the circulation of all the English dailies, they would equal about 15% of the circulation of the Daily Jang (an Urdu daily) alone. Dr. Hussain also pointed that even most of his peers, who have received higher education abroad and are among the most educated members of the population, read Urdu Newspapers; another indication of the continued dominance of Urdu in Pakistani society. His experience with students in primary schools in rural areas of Pakistan further supports his claim. For example, in an exercise, students were told how to access the websites of an Urdu newspaper and an English newspaper, and then asked to retrieve information regarding a certain event that had occurred the day before. More than 99% of the students went to the Urdu website to retrieve the information. Furthermore, when asked to write essays about themselves in Urdu and English, the fact that most students wrote only single paragraphs about themselves in English but wrote multiple pages about themselves in Urdu again shows how Urdu is still the language of choice for most Pakistanis.

Dr. Hussain’s love for Urdu and other local languages is plainly apparent as he talks about the importance of these languages. He understands that it is possible for English to become a universal language spoken by all, but points out that it would result in a huge cultural loss. The accents, oral histories, stories, songs, and poems, are all key cultural components of people and need to be preserved. CRULP is also playing a part in the preservation of local languages by documenting them, for example, the Torwali language — a language spoken by the people of Swat. Today only 60,000 people speak Torwali, making it an endangered language. The CRULP team is currently working with a scholar from the Swat region to prepare a Torwali dictionary, document Torwali grammar, and record Torwali literature like poems.

The CRULP team is working not only to preserve the lexicon of language, but also the beauty of the language itself. An example mentioned by Dr. Hussain regards the numerous ways each Urdu letter can appear in Urdu text. A single letter can have up to forty different forms depending on where it appears within a word, line, and paragraph. From a software engineers point of view, it would be practical to amalgamate similar forms of the letter and treat them as a single case, but the team refuses to compromise on the beauty of the letters and treats each case differently. The justification of text also requires special consideration in Urdu calligraphy. While English fonts usually increase the number of spaces between letters to justify text, Urdu calligraphers have traditionally stretched the letters themselves for this purpose and fonts developed by CRULP also use the same rule to justify Urdu text. Other projects in the pipeline include the use of text-to-speech and speech recognition systems to develop software geared towards blind users so they too can use computer and internet tools.

Even with the development of these local-language based systems, the availability of content still remains a major challenge. The fact is that until there isn’t sufficient Urdu content available in digital format, working on technology to make local language material accessible is of limited use. A goal mentioned by many of the team members and Dr. Hussain himself is the development of software that would take entire web pages and translate them into Urdu. Once this is done, the entire world wide web would be available to the Urdu speaking population. This is a goal the team hopes to achieve in the future.

To conclude, here are highlights of three projects currently in progress at CRULP.

Project Dareecha: Introducing sustainable technology into rural schools

Dareecha is the Pakistani component of the PAN localization project, a regional initiative funded by the IRDC (International Development Research Centre), Canada, which aims to develop sustainable technology for use in South and South-Eastern countries by encouraging the development of local language computing. Phase 2 of the project is currently in process, which is focusing on implementation of Urdu based software in local areas. Under this effort, CRULP has

Students in a training session in Maluwala

established computer labs at 10 schools in the Sargodha district of Punjab. During a course consisting of 3 five-day training sessions, students from these schools were taught the basics of computing, word processing internet browsing, website composition, email, and  chatting, all using Urdu based software. Some of the websites created by the students can be seen here and here (keep in mind that these were made by students who had never used computers before). The training session being complete, the evaluation of the students progress in now underway. The team is in touch with the students via email and summer website design competition is underway to encourage students to continue to use the labs and software and to gauge the effectiveness of the different programs developed.

Students using their newly learned email skills to stay in touch with the CRULP team

Adaptive English Language Teaching Tool (AELTT)

This project aims to develop thirty English language lessons to be used by 9th grade students. While such software exists, it mainly focuses on teaching English to European users thus making it unsuitable for Pakistani users who have difficulty understanding the accent of the voices used in these software and cannot relate to the given examples (for example, references are given to Christmas trees and bowling alleys). AELTT team members emphasized the fact that the software developed by the  will use a voice with a marked Pakistani accent and will only include local names and references to make sure students don’t have trouble understanding the lessons. Thus students will no longer  have to learn English through stories about  ‘Peter’ and ‘Jane’ playing ‘lacrosse’. The Institute of Education Research, Punjab University is collaborating with CRULP on this project and have planned and created thirty lessons. The team hopes to test the AELTT by August after which they hope to see it being used by primary schools across Pakistan.

Telephone-based Speech Interfaces for Access to Information by Non-literate Users

This project is being carried out in collaboration with the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of Carnegie Mellon University and the Agha Khan University and aims to develop a system, which would enable health workers to access medical information via phone through a speech recognition and text-to-speech system. This would make use of Pakistan’s extensive mobile phone network to give these workers access to information while out in the field. The text to speech software has been developed and currently team lead Huda Sarfraz and her team are working to develop a repository of audio files of Urdu words being spoken by different people. Once this is completed, the technology can not only be used to build the medical information system, but can also be deployed in future projects such as the system for blind users mentioned above.

Her first stop was at a local public primary school for boys in Kot Nawaz, where grades 1 to 5 were being taught. Due to the lack of funding, the school did not have an actual building. Trees served as classrooms and rugs as chairs for approximately 60 boys enrolled in the school.

	An English class being held as the teacher manages multiple classes at the same time. The younger children assemble in their class with the usual chaos that accompanies 5 year old kids.
	The kids clamor to have their picture taken as class is dismissed.
	As the children leave their class the primitiveness of their classroom comes into stark focus.

Her next stop was the Government Girls’ Primary School, Jhugian Chur, where again classes 1 to 5 were being taught. This school did have a proper building, but it only had two rooms which were used to teach five different classes. At the time of visit, a joint Urdu class was being held for two different grades where the level of education was constrained by the level of younger students (from lower grades).

	Government Girls’ Primary School, Jhugian Chur.
	A class in session. The girls are trying to get through their lesson even though most of them are distracted by the visitors.
	A joint Urdu class being held for the different grades resulting in all the children being taught the same rudimentary level of language. The sole teacher does not live in Jhugian Chur herself and takes a half an hour rickshaw ride everyday to get to school.

While the pictures merely provide a window to what is common scenery in most of the rural and suburban areas in Pakistan, they also serve as a stark reminder to the ground realities of the educational system in the country and to how far we have yet to progress in this area. With an estimated population of 174 million, Pakistan is a country rich in labor force. However, it often falls victim to its populace looking up to the government and developed nations for the solutions to its problems, even for those where innovation or (in many cases) will and hard work alone can go a long way. This is especially true in the area of literacy and basic education. Make no mistake, government’s lack of funding and oversight is the root cause for the deteriorating infrastructure of the public education system. However, as members of the community, our ruing this fact alone and taking solace in placing the blame on the right entity is not going to help anyone. Where most, who witness similar scenes during their daily routines, blame the government and get on with their lives, there are others who have shown that individual efforts can make a huge difference in the education scene of Pakistan.

Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greg Mortenson stumbled into the Pakistani village of Korphe in 1993 after a failed attempt to climb K2 where he witnessed poverty, lack of health care and education system and decided to do something about it. What followed was an amazing story of determination and sacrifice that has since resulted in about 80 schools in some of the most remote areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan providing education to over 24000 children (including about 14000 girls) who previously had little if any education opportunities. He is the director of the non-profit Central Asia Institute (CAI) and is also the founder of Pennies for Peace, an organization that educates American children about the world beyond their experience and shows that they can make a positive impact on a global scale, one penny at a time. His journey has been detailed in his best-selling book, “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time,” and is a must read for all those who want to make an impact in any public sector in Pakistan.

Mortenson’s success is not incidental. There are many other examples in our country where the vision of individuals and application made significant impact on the society. In 2000, a group of students from Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute (GIKI) noticed stark contrast between their educational facilities and those of the school-going children in Topi, and Project Topi was born. The project aims to create an environment for the children of Topi so that they are motivated enough to think that they can study and succeed. Students of GIKI take time out of their hectic schedule in order to teach local students and provide them with the motivation and aspiration they desperately need. The Citizens Foundation (TCF), a non-profit organization set up in 1995 by a group of citizens concerned with the dismal state of education in Pakistan, has established 600 purpose-built school units nationwide with an enrollment of 80,000 students. Developments in Literacy (DIL), another nonprofit by Pakistani-Americans, establishes, adopts and manages primary and secondary schools for underprivileged children in partnership with non-governmental organizations in all four provinces of Pakistan. DIL currently operates and manages 150 schools with an enrollment of nearly 15,000 students. READ Foundation, one of the largest educational NGOs of rural Pakistan, caters to around 60,000 students through 330 READ institutions, largely in the areas of Azad Kashmir and western NWFP.

Sana Fatima herself is a member of the projects team of LUMS Community Service (LCS). LCS is involved in coordinating and carrying out various charity campaigns and events. LCS website features this beautiful quote from Helen Keller that encapsulates the spirit of this article:

“I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do.” – Helen Keller

Editor’s Note: STEP envisions playing an active role in bringing together different societies working to achieve a common goal, i.e., promoting science, technology and education in Pakistan. The website will provide a common platform to feature key projects in this area, developing relationships, and collaboration between these groups as well as individuals with a vision. If you know an individual or an organization that is doing good work in this area or if you have innovative ideas for improvement, we would love to hear from you.

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.

STEP: Do you see the domain of the HEC decreasing in the future because of these delegations?

SN: No, because the problem that we work with is both large in magnitude and wide in spectrum. There is so much more that the world demands and these demands constantly evolve with the progress. Take quality assurance as an example. In the U.K., you have the Quality Assurance Agency, a huge independent entity that solely focuses on this issue. It is capable of carrying out research assessment exercises where it assesses research work and provides rankings. Development of quality assurance processes, ranking processes, and research assessment processes, etc. are performed by huge entities that have been developed around the world. Therefore, the HEC’s work will keep on increasing in the future. However, the HEC has to ensure that its main goal is to build the capacities within the universities so that when they are built then HEC can work as an external quality assurance mechanism or as a funding source.

STEP: You mentioned that the HEC is not involved with the colleges. Does the HEC see them as being beyond its mandate?

SN: Colleges are under the academic jurisdiction of the provincial governments. Therefore, they are legally and administratively beyond the HEC’s mandate. Colleges are directly tied to universities because they are affiliated with them and we do not want to shift this responsibility. But again, we can build the capacity of the university. Each affiliating university, such as Punjab University, has to basically become a mini HEC or become a quality assurance center for all of its colleges. They should take that responsibility. We have to build this capacity and we have started to move in this direction. Our first foray into this domain is trying to build distance education centers in these colleges to cater to private students, that is, those who are privately enrolled and are not looked after academically by these universities. These centers will enable universities to take care of these students in a proper manner. So this is an indirect way we are getting involved with the colleges.

STEP: Currently, there are two parallel streams of education in Pakistan; the madrassah system and the secular system. Do you think there is a way to merge these two streams into a common system?

SN: Absolutely! After all, such a system has previously existed in our history. Madrassahs have been a part of our history since the birth of Islam. I have visited the oldest Madrassah itself in Morocco and that is more than a thousand years old. I do not think there is any issue of the practical education not fitting into modern requirements. However, we should have a mechanism in our country, whereby a person coming through one system of education is not limited or barred from going anywhere else. So, we have to look at the courses that the madrassahs are teaching and that they are not teaching. If they are not teaching Mathematics or English or whatever that the policies of the country mandate to be taught, then the law needs to be applied to everyone. It is important for students to have the opportunity and the flexibility so that if they want to study jurisprudence they can, and if they want to study history then they also can. The basic idea is that the academia is open. We do not have closed universities and we do not have closed educational institutions. Everything that needs to be taught is open. These are the days of open courseware where everything is available through the Internet. The same openness must be applied to all education systems in Pakistan. If there is a madrassah curriculum, it needs to be put on a website, and it needs to be open to academic discourse just like courses at other universities. For instance, one can take an economic course at LUMS and ask questions concerning different issues, such as, why certain things are being done? what are the intended learning outcomes? and what are the pre-requisites? The rules of the game need to be the same; the quality assurance mechanism needs to be across the board. It is not a western concept to have quality assurance or openness. So I certainly believe that you can have a system that has the richness and the openness to have everyone involved and everyone’s point of view taken care of while also adhering to international practices of quality assurance.

STEP: Does the HEC plan to do something to unify these two different streams?

SN: This is not our domain of operation. As a policy domain we would say that this is something a university should consider. But the actual roots are down at the school level where this issue has to be sorted out and that is not in our domain.

STEP: Could you walk us through the making of a new policy at the HEC?

SN: Well, when a policy idea comes up, we typically set up a working group. Then depending upon the nature and the size of the problem we develop drafts and circulate them to the concerned people. They would bring changes to it, approve it or not, and then finally it goes to the commission for approval.

STEP: Do you have any mechanism for gauging ideas from academics?

SN: We are an open organization in the sense that everybody, each one of us, has email, and we are all required to respond to every single email that we get. In that regards, it is a very open system. In addition, university faculties have their own circles and groups, which they work within and ideas sort of come up. Policies are big things that the entire nation needs to be involved in. They can be localized, for example, we are trying to focus on and develop a sexual harassment policy for academia in Pakistan. So we’ll put something together, it will be widely circulated, and then it will brew up into something narrow. But again, it will still be broad enough to be applicable to every higher education institution in Pakistan.

STEP: This method of gauging ideas seems very informal. Do you think there should be a formal mechanism whereby academics could actively debate and discuss issues regarding higher education?

SN: It is not an informal thing in the sense that while the start (when someone comes up with an idea or identifies an issue to address) is informal, once the idea is there and it is decided that a policy should be developed, then it enters into the formal domain. There is a formal committee or task force constituted where we try to have maximum and most diverse participation. Then drafts are prepared, circulated, and put on the website. You first get input from everybody and then you go through the formal process.

STEP: So anybody can contribute to the policy making process at any time?

SN: Yes, there is no question of having it closed. Academia is open; that is the whole concept of academia.

STEP: The HEC has always endeavored to facilitate universities. Why do you think some faculty members have been resistant to its changes?

SN: Well, some of our policies were perhaps drafted in haste; we wanted to do a lot of things in a hurry and perhaps did not have as wide consultations as were required. So there were certain things that we were proposing that were felt as if they were not in the best interest of these people. It was a communication issue. Also, since we were talking about a lot of entrenched interests, we were disturbing the status quo, so an immediate reaction also came about at times. It was a mixture of things; we were partly at fault. Some of the faculty members were not ready for the change. I guess that is the nature of deal. If you want to bring about change then that’s what happens.

STEP: What is your vision for the HEC? What goals have you set for yourself for the next ten years?

SN: The vision and the goal is to build the institution of the HEC in such a manner that myself or any other individual becomes irrelevant. We want to build the processes that allow one person to go and another to come in while still maintaining a very strong and vibrant system. Another goal is to have a much greater and improved communication with the universities, the students, and the community at large. We want the entire system of higher education to view and accept the HEC as a partner in the development process of the higher education sector.

A very big challenge that we foresee is in terms of funding. This heavy reliance of public sector universities on government is not going to allow us to pull out of this narrow regime of availability of higher education that we are currently in. We have estimated the funds it would take us to maintain our current growth rate and that runs into trillions. And that’s not going to come from the government alone. So their [the universities’] capacity to raise funds and operate just like private universities, such as LUMS, needs to be developed and that will happen once the community starts taking interest in them. Once you get expatriate Pakistanis as well as local industrialists to work with these universities, the universities will get out of this mindset that the government is the only entity that can support them. Aligned with the financial systems is, building a safety net through enhanced equity in our higher education system. Even though we do not think so, we have basically somewhat of an elitist system of higher education, primarily centered on the big cities and catering to a certain class. Regardless of whether the tuition fees is a hundred rupees or five hundred rupees, living in Lahore or Karachi along with the cost of books and transport alone require financial means that are not available to most students. And what about the other areas? The secondary cities; even the suburban areas like Shahdara or Kala Shah Kaku. We need to spread the higher education institution across the country without sacrificing the quality and provide a much more equitable system so that those who need support are fully supported and those who do not need support also put in their fair share.

The final challenge is in terms of quality assurance; building the world class systems that are linked and have a direct relationship with their counterpart international organization so that we are recognized and our degrees and our systems are recognized.

Related Post: A Conversation with HEC Executive Director Dr. Sohail Naqvi: Part 1

“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.”

Currently, 85 universities are involved in the project, including all the major business and engineering institutions like LUMS, IBA, GIKI and FAST. So it seems like the the government have taken note of the industry-academia gap and are taking positive steps to address the problem. So far so good.

But when you take a closer look at the project things start to look slightly less rosy. The first thing that struck me was the funding granted to this project. According to the National ICT R&D Fund’s website 12.19 million rupees were given to Naseeb Online Services (Pvt) Ltd (the parent company of ROZEE.PK) to carry out this initiative, which seems like a lot for basically developing an interactive website. These must be some awesome portals.

Which leads to the second disappointment. The portals seem to have little more than the content already available on ROZEE.PK. Looking at the NUST Portal, you’ll see a list of available vacancies which are the same as the ones shown on ROZEE.PK’s homepage and the same as the ones shown on other portals. No screening seems to be done at all. The rest of the page shows some logos of  “featured employers” which I can only assume are of companies who have hired from this institution before and a calendar. Other links include the Student, Alumni, and Employer Corners which again allow students to make profiles of themselves and employers to search through these profiles (something ROZEE.PK was already doing).

Although I appreciate the effort and recognize the need of industry-academia interaction, is this really the best way to go? Give 12.19 million rupees to a company to basically tweak its own website and put a University’s name at the top? The original proposal for the project lists the following academic objectives of the project:

(i) produce higher quality graduates who would have amassed practical training gained through industry internships advertised on their university’s portal,
(ii) better align faculty research with industry needs,
(iii) attract additional skilled graduates to join university faculty due to increased research funding from industry,
(iv) perform analytics to better identify education gaps and improvement areas.

Only the first objective seems relevant to the portals created, but since ROZEE.PK was performing this job anyway I don’t see how a portal is of any use. No mention of research is made on the portals I visited (except LUMS which has “Research Papers” link pointing to an empty page) and unless there are some special pages that are not visible to the general public, I don’t see how the industry and faculty are “aligning” through these portals (again only LUMS has a faculty corner). And with regards to the last point, wouldn’t it have been easier to just ask the participating universities and companies to email them these statistics?

In conclusion, while I think the idea is a good one, it does not justify the funding granted to it. Surely, the Ministry of Information Technology can look past the flashy websites and see that the project is not as revolutionizing as it claims to be. Or am I missing something?

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.

STEP: Coming to your work in the HEC, very few people managed to survive the change in government. How did you manage to survive the cut?

SN: That is a good question. I have felt that the true challenge to an organization is to move beyond the individual realm, which Pakistan seems to be suffering from, and to build an institution. The true test would be when we would survive an actual change in administration and see whether the HEC is an institution or just a bunch of individuals. So we all took that challenge very seriously. We had been working since the very beginning to institutionalize everything and we had done everything purely on merit. So we just had to buckle down and weather the storm and allow our work to speak for itself. And that is what has happened with the grace of God. We continued to work in an absolutely merit based manner and were not partial to any entity whatsoever and ultimately our work was recognized and we were supported by the new administration as well. Begum Shahnaz Wazir Ali has played a critical role in this transition and without her leadership we would not have survived the cut.

STEP: After the change in government, the HEC’s budget was drastically cut. I would like to congratulate you on having these budget cuts reversed recently. How did you manage to bring this about?

SN: It was actually a very long struggle. We had in fact been working with the World Bank for many years trying to convince them to support the government of Pakistan for the higher education sector. The World Bank had never given any budgetary support loan to any county in the world to support higher education; it had always been lower education or technical education. So we had to work long and hard with them to convince them of the successes of the HEC program and show that this is viable. That came through and helped the government to go over the budgetary shortfalls.

STEP: Do these loans from the World Bank come with any terms?

SN: The terms are financial in nature and do not have any policy implications. This is a budgetary support role, thus the World Bank is supporting the higher education program of the Government of Pakistan and is not funding any one particular initiative. The financial terms are soft and have a ten year grace period, thirty year repayment period and the interest rate is half a percent.

STEP: During your tenure at the HEC, what have been the HEC’s three biggest achievements?

SN: I think that probably the biggest achievement is bringing respect back to the university, through the university and the university faculty; the university as an institution being recognized by the country and its people as something to be proud of, to be nurtured and to be built. That, I think, is something to be proud of. The second would be the rebirth of research in our universities. Whereas universities were indulging in research in a sporadic, individual based manner, now they have taken on the research agenda with much more vigor, with an across the board response to it and this is something that the entire country is involved with. The third thing would be the introduction of a system of education that is compatible with the best in the world, which involved changing the bachelors and masters degree structure, restructuring the four year undergraduate program, introducing a course-based masters, and introducing a course-based PhD, so that the academic structure in Pakistan is compatible with the best structure that is practiced in the world. No Pakistani graduating now can feel that they have gone through a system that is inferior to anybody. The system is not inferior, the system is compatible. Now what matters is the work that you do.

STEP: Have these achievements had any tangible effects up till now?

SN: Most definitely there have been tangible results. We can talk about simple numbers, in terms of the number of students who are engaged in higher education in the country. This was estimated to be 2.6% of the youth population when the HEC started operation and it is now crossing 4.7%. Then, there are a number of disciplinary opportunities that are available to students. Five years ago when you completed an FSc degree in engineering and you did not get into one of the few engineering campuses, basically you had to sit back and figure out, “which college am I going to go to? What am I going to do?” Now it is a completely different scenario. If you’re coming from the IT stream, there is IT, computer science, and telecommunication, but you can also receive undergraduate degrees in physics, mathematics, etc. We have also been able to get people to voluntarily come back to Pakistan as academics. There were many Pakistanis doing PhDs abroad by themselves. They are now choosing to follow an academic discipline in Pakistan. We have a tenure track system, respectable salaries, and a good environment to work in the universities. People are coming back to our public universities and are taking teaching positions over here. In terms of research publications, Pakistan had on the order of 700 or so international publications per year throughout the 90s. In 2008, we crossed the 4000 mark in terms of publications. Just Quaid-e-Azam University alone, which is the number one research university in Pakistan, is crossing 500 publications in one year.

Then, in terms of quality assurance, [we have set up] the entire structure, the mechanism of quality enhancement cells, and accreditation councils. I mean, we never had any mechanisms for checking the quality of computer science programs in Pakistan. We had two year bachelor degrees, three year BCS, four year degrees, BITs, etc. I mean, you think about it, and a nomenclature in the structure existed. Today, we have a single four year undergraduate program. We have an accreditation council and we have a rating system, which is going ahead and checking programs. So in terms of quality, we are a far cry from where we were.

STEP: The HEC’s achievements that you listed are confined entirely to a very small percentage of the population. How do you think the HEC has positively affected society at large?

SN: I think with the society at large, our greatest impact has been on the parents, who are looking to provide university education to their children. We are not having a large impact on the policy-makers, which is where much more work needs to be done. That would mean much greater emphasis on the social sciences and the humanities, and continued capacity building of the faculty members, so that they take a leadership position with the development of policies. You see, universities should have an inherent leadership position in society. They are moving towards that and in some cases they have. I mean, when I switch on the TV and I see, for example, a sociology professor from NED [University] talking, it makes me happy that the media would come to faculty members and look at them as experts. But our society is very large and at a policy level you have got to understand that only one percent of the youth (17 to 23 years of age) or a little more are enrolled in universities. Ninety nine percent are not. Three to Four percent are in colleges, distant education (Allama Iqbal Open University), and other programs such as internal programs, etc. That would still leave 95% out of the loop. That is what is not being understood and that is the biggest battle Pakistan faces, the 95%; what are you going to do about that?

The work of HEC has begun to bring dignity back to our Institutions of higher learning. Society is looking up to them for leadership, industry is coming to them for talent and a solution to their problems. Some new breakthroughs are beginning to surface so the future looks bright.

STEP: But the 95% should also benefit from the HEC work. Shouldn’t research focus on local problems?

SN: Research should focus on local problems. That is something that needs to be done; Research needs to be locally relevant and it needs to be of an international standard. This is where I think that we need to do more work in incentivizing our faculty members to take up local challenges. For example, a manufacturing technology center was put up in UET Lahore, looking at the small to medium scale manufacturing industry that is concentrated in Lahore. An automobile center in Karachi, a date palm research center in Shah Abdul Latif in Khairpur, earthquake engineering machine center in Peshawar … are some examples of how HEC is supporting locally relevant research. But the faculty needs to be motivated to do that, and that requires more work.

STEP: Perhaps the HEC should restrict the research grants to research that focuses on locally relevant problems.

SN: You see there is a supply and demand issue. Pakistan’s problem, and this is something that one needs to really, really understand, is that of capacity. We just don’t have that many researchers, who are doing research. So of these people who are applying for research now, if you want to put in an additional constraint of forcing them to focus on local problems only, then you will have to define what is locally relevant and what is not. That appears to be an easy problem to solve but in practice it would be just about impossible. There are only degrees of relevance here. All research is relevant to Pakistan but the time frame in which it may impact local conditions is going to be different. But then this does not mean that you have to move away from this challenge of getting research to be locally relevant. Let’s say you need to work on the Thar coal fields. You need a large number of experts in various inter-disciplinary fields to actually focus on such problems. You have to understand that practical problems are extremely, extremely complex at times to address. Solving them at times requires you to have a very large team of experts which may not exist at any one university. What you can do and where universities can make a contribution, is to focus on development a little more; that means much more in terms of applied research. Let’s say there is a small factory producing some goods. It is possible to undertake a project to automate the factory units. Maybe you design software to speed things up, you look at the business processes – this is much more in the applied domain, which sort of gets out of the university domain. So this is a challenge in which each of us in the universities and academia has to ask ourselves that question of “how are we going to be relevant?”

STEP: How does the HEC plan to face this challenge?

SN: One thing we are doing in the social science domain is the introduction of thematic research, where themes are identified by groups of local experts, and this is something that we are also going to be introducing in the scientific fields. Our first goal was to get research going, to get people in that mindset – thinking and being inquisitive and innovative. Now, there is the question of starting to channel these resources so that there are, for example, technologists, who can look at food, agriculture, and ways of harvesting, [which is] one of the big areas of possible economic benefit in Pakistan. We could also start looking at issues of health for Pakistan and this has already started to happen. The Center of Excellence in Molecular Biology, for example, is looking at hepatitis and what we can do to locally manufacture interferons to treat this disease. Similarly, things are also beginning to happen in the direction of producing genetically modified crops for Pakistan. It is now necessary to take the next step, identify a number of themes and support research in those identified areas.

STEP: When do you think the common man will start seeing the benefits of this research?

SN: The common man has started to benefit. For example, this interferon developed by the Center of Excellence in Molecular Biology is ready for human testing. The problem is that the protocols for human testing in Pakistan are not yet well defined, since this is the first time this has happened. As soon as that happens, we are talking about millions of hepatitis infected patients being able to be treated by a medicine developed in Pakistan. Similarly, there are other products, and these days we are trying to put together an intellectual property portfolio for Pakistan, where we would categorize these [products] and try to get local or foreign investments going. The next challenge is to get research out of universities and into the industry domain. There are other interesting possibilities, such as salt-tolerant crops, which can be used as fodder for animals and can grow in millions of acres in Baluchistan. There are some vaccines that are being developed for animals, poultry, cows, etc., with huge benefits. So there is this kind of work which is beginning to show up, which is of commercial interest and will impact the common man. I am hoping in the next five year time-frame that these products, at least some of them, should be in the market.

STEP: A major challenge the HEC faces is the “elitist” quality of Pakistan’s higher education. How do you plan to face this challenge?

SN: Well, the way we are doing it is multi-pronged. We are taking higher education out of the main city framework so you have universities now in Malakand, in Hazara, in Sargodha, in Gujrat…so we have enlarged that domain. And we provided them with the latest IT technology so that they are linked. The other thing is this entire issue of a need based scholarship framework, in which we are providing scholarships and developing the capacity of need assessment so that you can actually identify who requires financial aid and who doesn’t require financial aid. The third path is the outreach path, where you are actively going into the rural schools or the suburban schools of Multan or Dera Ghazi Khan and building the capacity of students from the schools in these regions to take entrance examinations of top universities in Pakistan. All three approaches together are addressing the key issue of equitable access to higher education in Pakistan.

STEP: What were some of the policies or plans that did not do as well as you were hoping?

SN: I think the issue of governance has been the most difficult because, you may not know it, in the early days there was a great talk about the Model University Ordinance. There was talk about restructuring the existing universities and bringing in new governance structures. It was not accepted by the faculty and that was one of the areas where we did not make much headway. That is the only one I can think of at this time.

STEP: What about the HEC’s plan to build universities with foreign aid?

SN: Yes, that was another policy put in place much later, to build these mega universities. It is not on the table anymore. We have decided to scrap those projects and to rethink them and redesign these as well. They were too big and too ambitious, and if you combine that with the worldwide economic recession, then it is clear that the project is no longer viable.

STEP: One of the justifications for these mega-universities was that because of the PhD scheme we will have many PhDs returning to Pakistan without institutions to absorb them. Now that the mega university project has been scrapped, do you think we have the universities to absorb the incoming PhDs?

SN: The current fraction of PhD qualified faculty in our universities is hardly crossing 24% at this time. Three out of four faculty members do not have PhDs even currently. The student-teacher ratios are high and the demands are extreme. We have new campuses opening up, we have a rapidly expanding university system growing at a rate of about 15% per year. Now to cater to this growth of 15% alone would require an addition of about a thousand to twelve hundred teachers per year. So there is no shortage of capacity to absorb PhD qualified faculty in our universities. Also, as research is taking a hold in our universities, research groups in different areas are beginning to form in different institutions. This in turn feeds the demand for additional highly qualified faculty which is going to be available in the future.

STEP: So they will have jobs when they return?

SN: Yes they have jobs; in fact the HEC guarantees them a job. Any new PhD will be hired by the HEC for the first year if they cannot find a job; so that is not an issue.

In part two, we talk with Dr. Naqvi about the mandate of the HEC, the future of the organization, and how policies are crafted at the HEC.

Editor’s Note: Minor edits have been made to the article since it was first published.

Related Post: A Conversation with HEC Executive Director Dr. Sohail Naqvi: Part 2