Talking points: CM announces universities for each district

Distributes vehicles for colleges, scholarship cheques

PESHAWAR: The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government announced the establishment of a university campus in each district of the province.

Chief Minister Pervez Khattak made the announcement during his speech at a ceremony held by the higher education department at Shuhada-e-APS Memorial Library on Monday. At the event, he handed over vehicles to colleges and distributed scholarship cheques among MPhil and PhD scholars.

“The youth are an asset to our nation and their future is not dependent on big buildings or roads, but improvement of the education system,” Khattak said. “That is the reason the government has been taking steps from the first day to change the decades-old system and the measures have proven fruitful.”

He added providing education to people in far-flung areas was a top priority of the government. The chief minister added the administration was working on creating a system under which the transfer of government teachers would be banned and their promotion would be conditional on the performance of their institutions. He added rewards and penalties would also be decided under the same system.

100 vehicles

The CM said the previous regimes did not focus on schools and paid little attention to the needs of the institutes, while the PTI government will ensure all such necessary requirements are fulfilled.

Khattak announced the provision of 100 vehicles to colleges this year and issued orders to recruit teachers on a contractual basis to fill 1,300 vacancies. Khattak distributed the keys of 50 vans among principals of various colleges. He also gave scholarship cheques worth Rs100 million to 315 MPhil and PhD scholars under the faculty development programme of the higher education department.

Special Assistant to Chief Minister on Information and Higher Education Mushtaq Ghani said the department was establishing 59 colleges at the district level and work on 29 of them had been completed. At the same time, the rest have also been approved.

According to Ghani, 14 vans were handed over last year while 50 were distributed on Monday and 25 have been approved for purchase.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2015.