PESHAWAR, As many as 75 private colleges across the province are not registered with the Higher Education Regularity Authority (HERA), which is violation of the law, it is learnt.

HERA was established in 2001 to streamline, supervise and regulate the functioning of private educational institutions in the province.

To check the unbridled growth of higher education institutions in the private sector and regulate their functioning, the provincial government had on Oct 15, 2001, promulgated an ordinance “The North West Frontier Province Registration and Functioning of Private Educational Institutions Ordinance, 2001”, establishing HERA.

The ordinance was aimed at setting stringent criteria both for public and private sector institutions in order to improve the quality of higher education.

Under the law, all higher education institutions in the private sector are required to register with HERA before affiliation with a public sector university.

Non-registration of the col leges, an official of HERA told Dawn, was also causing a huge loss of money to the national exchequer as, he added, the registration would generate millions of rupees.

The registration fee of professional colleges is Rs150,000 and their annual renewal fee is Rs2,000. Similarly, the registration fee of non-professional colleges is Rs50,000 and their annual renewal fee is Rs3,000.

When asked why the colleges were not registering with HERA, the official said owners of these private colleges claimed that they had established the institutions before the promulgation of the ordinance under which HERA was established.

However, the ordinance states that institutions affiliated with various universities in public the sector before the promulgation of the ordinance were also required to get registered with HERA.

Through the said ordinance the previous law dealing with such issues -- West Pakistan Registration of Unrecognized Educational Institutions Ordinance, 1962 -- was repealed and it was stated that all educational institutions registered under that law should be deemed registered under the 2001 ordinance on the same terms and conditions as determined or might be determined for registration of a educational institution under the fresh ordinance.

Most of the owners of the unregistered private colleges were working on important posts in the University of Peshawar or other departments, the HERA official said. “The owners are influential people and are not caring for HERA,” he said.

All the unregistered private colleges were affiliated with the Peshawar and Gomal universities, he said. These colleges had been functioning illegally for the last 10 years, he said.

He said HERA could declare such colleges as illegal but could not close them down because there was no provision in the law regarding closure of colleges for not abiding by HERA directives.

The authority, he added, had proposed amendments to the law to empower it to close the colleges that violated the law.