Medical college anomalies

Many of the seats available to ‘foreigners’ do not get filled for and thus become a wasted opportunity.

A curious situation has come to light in regard to admissions to medical colleges in Punjab. The colleges in Punjab offer 161 seats for foreign students but not one for overseas Pakistanis — which in the face of it is puzzlingly discriminatory. By contrast, both Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) do have reserved seats for overseas Pakistanis in their public medical colleges. Those Pakistanis that have a dual nationality are immediately eligible for places in public medical colleges in Punjab as they are regarded as ‘foreigners’. Those that live outside the country (many of whom send substantial remittances back home) may not apply. There are about 3.7 million Pakistanis living in and around the Gulf region, none of whom need to bother to make an application for a public medical college in Punjab.

It is difficult to know whether this is a sin of omission or commission that has over time become institutionalised, coming to light more or less by chance. It transpires that many of the seats available to ‘foreigners’ do not get filled for a variety of reasons and thus become a wasted opportunity. In large part this may be because the seats are not cheap — they are self-financing and dual-nationality Pakistanis that have the money may well choose to spend it in countries other than Pakistan to get their medical education. The newly-installed Secretary Health, Dr Ijaz Munir, said, when this newspaper raised the matter of this anomaly with him, that he was unaware of it and would be looking into the matter. This is the standard ministerial response and the curious case of the unfilled places in medical colleges in Punjab is now parked in an obscure filing cabinet. Anomalies such as this abound throughout academia in Pakistan, and we would urge the Health Secretary to do a little housekeeping as a matter of priority.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2014.

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