A bright spot

Punjab Government has allotted the land, a political adversary of PTI, on which Namal College has been built.

Good news in Pakistan is relatively rare, good news about higher education even rarer. The Namal College has just awarded 60 BSc degrees at its first convocation ceremony, degrees which are granted through the University of Bradford in the UK with which it is affiliated. There can be no fingers pointed which suggest that the degrees awarded are in any way second rate as they come with an international imprimatur of repute. The convocation was addressed by the Chairman of the PTI, Imran Khan, who made the point that there are double standards in education with the children of the wealthy getting educated in English and a lower quality of instruction offered to poorer students in Urdu. Educationists may not agree with him that the standard of education offered in English is any better than that offered in Urdu, with both often being indifferent — but his point is fairly made.

Namal College is relatively new, having been established in 2008. It is said not to be a political project and there is an encouraging example of bipartisanship in that the Punjab government — no friend of the PTI — allotted the land on which it has been built to a project sponsored by a political adversary. With the first batch having been awarded their ‘wings’ and now set to fly away, others will follow. It was also encouraging to note that the degrees which were awarded were all in engineering and Pakistan has a deficit of appropriately qualified engineers — as opposed to a surfeit of doctors. Let us hope that these young men and women find jobs quickly and become the bricks in the wall of human capital that we so often neglect in pursuit of more ‘glamourous’ fields of education. Namal College is shortly to be expanded to include a school on the same 40-kanal site. It is clearly a success, a success that can be replicated in other parts of the country.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 17^th, 2013.

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