Stranded students

Nearly three dozen Pakistani students have written a desperate letter to the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) government asking it to release funds which are supposed to pay their tuition and stipend under what they were led to believe was a fully paid scholarship for higher education in China. Last September, these students were sent to the Shandong Normal University under the K-P Chief Minister’s Scholarship Programme, launched by the Frontier Education Foundation.

The students claim they were told that this would be a fully paid scholarship and that they would receive stipends. Hence the 32 recipients from across the province, including some from the erstwhile Fata and women, eagerly embarked on their Master’s and PhD programmes. With the name of the chief minister attached and the backing of the government, some said it allayed their suspicions when they had to fork out fees for visas and hostels from their own pockets. But alarm bells truly rang when the foundation changed its stance and told them that they would have to bear expenses of the first semester themselves. As a result, the students say they have been sustaining on money sent by their families or by borrowing from friends. In video messages, some of the students said they were at the end of their tether as living in China was a very costly affair. Some even expressed the desire to return home.

This is a highly unfortunate situation. Such scholarship programmes are aimed at providing local students with quality education at foreign institutions and utilise the knowledge gained by them for the development of the country. But the basic prerequisite for this is that students are fully backed by their governments. By leaving them short, the government is sabotaging its chances of spurring knowledge development in the province. The government must immediately launch a thorough investigation into this foul-up and release funds for the students.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 18^th, 2020.

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