The troubled HEC

The crisis relates to recurring budget funding. The Teacher and Staff Union is threatening to shut down operations.

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) and with it, higher education, is in trouble. The HEC executive director, Dr Sohail Naqvi, has made presentations to the finance minister and the Planning Commission to apprise them of a situation going awry. Here’s the gist.

The crisis relates to recurring budget funding. The Teacher and Staff Union is threatening to shut down university operations. The prime minister announced a 50 per cent increase in the salaries of government employees. University salaries are paid indirectly by the government which provides funds to the HEC which then funds the universities. But no extra funds have been provided to HEC to cater to this increase which means no salary raise for university staff and faculty.

The government has released Rs2.1 billion to HEC in the current financial year. The money, 23 per cent of the promised funds from January 1 to wit, barely caters for scholarships. All other projects are suspended. The bigger problem, however, is the contracts already awarded. The contractors need to be paid for work already done and the HEC needs at least Rs5 billion to meet these requirements.

The HEC accepts that fund raising, land utilisation and effective business plans are imperative ideas for the long-term but points out that the problem is immediate. It needs money today! The government kitty is empty. Already stressed, the floods have taken care of the rest. A quick chat with Dr Nadeemul Haque, the incisive deputy chairman of the Planning Commission (PC), highlighted some of the problems.

Apparently, the PC has tried to preserve the HEC share even in this regime of scarce resources. But the floods have cut the Public Sector Development Programme to the bone. “We can only give the HEC from what we have and it will be triflingly little.” The situation requires good management and careful development within the existing resource envelope.

The PC’s beef with the HEC and the universities is that the universities never developed a business plan and the HEC, when the tidings were good, never got them to develop one. Instead, and this is where the HEC has got flak from several quarters, it allowed the universities to live on official funding with nary a thought to generating their own funds. Worse, the universities went into overdrive on ill-planned expansion. Now they are left with much brick and mortar but very little or no software in terms of good faculty, cutting-edge education programmes or even smart students.

Nadeem says they give HEC a one line budget and “they can choose to spend on whatever they like”. He stresses that the $100 million the HEC has got should be reallocated. “Pay for scholarships rather than paying contractors,” as he puts it. Problem is, the hardware that is already erected needs to be paid for. HEC doesn’t have the money so the universities don’t have it either and the PC’s kitty is empty.

Nadeem has a list of land with the universities, land they have been given by the state: Quaid-i-Azam Univesity  has 1,700 acres; NUST 900; Punjab University 240 acres. This is more than any of the private universities can boast of. “Most of this is valuable city centre land. And they keep it empty.  Harvard has land endowment and has used it to build an endowment of $40 billion. Why can’t they use this land for developing resources?” asks Nadeem.

True, the universities have no business plan; heck! they have never even thought of one. Most have no idea that a business plan simply means working out assets and liabilities so the assets can be used creatively for fund generation. If there is a shortfall still they can ask for subsidies.

And why have they never thought of it? You guessed right! They have a sense of entitlement! The state gives the money so all’s well. The land can be used for housing and clubs and primitive farming.

So, what can be done? Stop erecting useless hardware; make a business plan; focus on software and consolidation rather than expansion; tighten the belt; take some punishment; think modern. A tough call this in the short-term, especially because the salary increase should not have gone through given an empty exchequer. And now the well-meaning Dr Naqvi is caught in the middle.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2010.