Students suffer under shortage of teachers, say officials. PHOTO: FILE
Government Superior Science College Peshawar (GSSC) has hired new teachers using college funds to overcome the shortage of faculty members, particularly for the recently introduced Bachelor of Science (BS) programme.
Officials told The Express Tribune the size of the student body at GSSC is around 4,000 and 77 posts have been sanctioned for teachers. Nine new lecturers have been hired to teach different subjects while two others were recruited on an ad hoc basis.
“Apart from the two hired on ad hoc basis, we have hired two lecturers using college funds for the English department, three for Physics and one each for Computer Science, Geography, Pakistan Studies and Botany,” said an official requesting anonymity as he was not authorised to talk to the media.
He said the new lecturers are being paid Rs15,000 from the funds allocated to the college by the Higher Education Department (HED). The situation, however, worsened with the introduction of the BS programme as a majority of the disciplines the programme offers could not be taught due to shortage of faculty, he added.
“You can understand how miserable the condition of our education will be when you only pay Rs15,000 to a faculty member for teaching students at the college level,” said the official.
Ultimately, it is the students who pay the price as no specific faculty recruitments have been chalked out since the BS programme was launched. “They find their teachers lecturing another class. Faculty members cannot be present in two different classes at the same time,” said the official.
“There are only six out of 10 sanctioned lecturers in the English department and a few other departments are facing similar problems,” he said. Another HED official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said GSSC was not the only institution suffering from the shortage in faculty. “The provincial public service commission needs to advertise the posts since it takes more than three years to complete the process.”
He said the department has issued directives to all colleges to hire staff using college funds in order to meet their requirements.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 4th, 2013.
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