Govt to spend Rs500m on students from FATA, Balochistan and G-B

The money will be used to pay tuition fee of students pursuing postgraduate studies.

ISLAMABAD: The government will spend Rs500 million on students from Balochistan, FATA and Gilgit-Baltistan pursuing Masters, M.Phil and PhD this year.

Students from these areas and studying in public universities in the three regions will be eligible for a full wee waiver. The concession is being granted under the “Prime Minister’s Tuition Fee Payment Scheme for Masters and Ph.D”.

The scheme was approved the federal cabinet in June and aims to enhance the opportunities available to the talented but financially constrained students from remote and far-flung areas of the country.

The mechanism for its implementation was discussed in the first meeting of the scheme’s steering committee on Saturday. The amount that the federal government will spend on the scheme was also disclosed in the meeting.

The meeting was chaired by Ministry of Education and Trainings Secretary Qamar Zaman Chaudhry and attended by HEC Executive Director Dr Sohail H Naqvi, Additional Finance Secretary Abdul Khaliq, Balochistan Higher Education Secretary Sher Khan Bazai, HEC Human Resource Development Adviser Prof. Riaz Hussain Qureshi and other senior officials.

“The concessional package will be effective from July 1, 2012 and the entire the amount submitted under tuition fee after July will be refunded to the students,” Dr Qureshi told The Express Tribune.

Under the scheme, the government will also cover other academic, incidental or mandatory fees charged by the universities.

The concession also applies to students from FATA who are studying in universities in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

The programme will only be applicable in the institutions of the students’ home provinces. It will not cover students of private universities and self-finance programmes.

The scheme will be executed by the HEC and has initially been introduced for five years. However the students selected under the scheme in its last year, i.e. 2016-17, will continue to be funded until they complete their studies.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 24^th, 2012.