ISLAMABAD: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) will expand its attestation department in a bid to reduce the turnaround time for documents verification and attestation, said an HEC official on Thursday.
Mr Rahim Bux Channa, Director General Accreditation and Attestation at HEC, said that about 400 students come to HEC for attestation of their documents everyday. This number, he said, rises to about a 1000 daily during winters when students apply to universities in European countries.
The document’s verification department was further burdened when the Election Commission of Pakistan tasked HEC with verifying parliamentarians’ degrees. “[Currently,] there is very limited staff in the attestation section, and it cannot manage the increasing number of applications,” Director Channa said. “We have requested the top management [of HEC] for additional staff so that the process of verification could be completed within the given time,” he added.
The department has four service counters, with people having to wait for hours before they can get their documents processed. Applicants often complain that the procedure is very complicated and takes an entire day.
Also, applicants coming to HEC after 10:30am for documents attestation are turned away and told to come back the next day.
Students from far-flung areas are particularly inconvenienced, given that getting to Islamabad before 10:30am is not always possible unless they stay in the city overnight.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 27th, 2010.
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