PESHAWAR, Government’s failure to release funds to the Higher Education Commission’s scholarship programme has dashed the hopes of a number of university teachers selected to pursue PhD studies abroad, it is learnt.

More recently, the country-wide strike by university teachers for 50 per cent pay rise further overshadowed the case of these teachers who went through a long and tough process of selection for the Human Resource Development scholarship programme of the HEC.

Sources said that majority of the selected teachers had been stopped from proceeding abroad due to lack of funds. Teachers working in the newly-set up universities are the worst-affected as their institutions have no financial resources to bear the expenses of their study.

“We got admission in the Sussex University and as stopgap arrangement we paid some of the accommodation and travel expenses from our own pocket, but we were told not to pro- ceed abroad as the HEC has no funds for us,” said a university teacher on condition of anonymity.

“It was heart-breaking for me to know that we can’t go abroad for study after we passed every test with good grades,” says another winner teacher of the HRD scholarship.

Public sector universities, especially the newly-opened, are facing shortage of PhD teachers, as under the rules there should be at least three PhD teachers to start a department.

The sources said that expenditure on every PhD scholar was around Rs10 million and a big number of 400 scholars who qualified for the HRD programme were deprived of their right to pursue PhD studies.

Federation of All Pakistan Universities Academic Staff Association’s provincial president Prof. Fida Mohammad said that depriving the teachers of the right of academic development would force them to demand abolition of the PhD degree condition for promotion.

Prof. Sahfiqur Rehman, senior faculty member of the University of Peshawar (UoP), said that the HEC-funded scholarship programme had been gravely affected due funds shortage, but the UoP was sending its teachers on foreign scholarships as PhD teachers were direly needed.

He said that UoP had sent three of its faculty members abroad and would bear their expenses for the four-year programme from its own financial resources.

In the near future the UoP will need more PhD teachers, as 23 professors would retire in 2012-2013. Of the 500 faculty members of the UoP only one third staff is PhD qualified. We still need to develop the faculty, said Prof. Rehman.

Dr. Saeed Anwar, registrar of the Islamia College University, said that seven teachers won the scholarships, but two faculty members who had already foreign MPhil qualification were sent abroad as lesser funds were required for their PhD studies. He said that the HEC had not released funds for the others.

He said that this was the first batch of teachers who were going for PhD on scholarship programme and depriving them of financial support would affect the university faculty.

“The federal government should support and release funds to at least the new universities under the HRD programme as they have no financial resources like old universities,” Dr Anwar said.