The M.Phil and Ph.D students of the University of Peshawar (UoP) have expressed concern over what they believed was discriminatory attitude of the Higher Education Commission, Islamabad, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Higher Education Department for ignoring them in scholarship and laptop schemes.
They asked Chief Minister Pervez Khattak and HEC Acting Chairman Syed Imtiaz Hussain Gilani to take note of the matter and provide them justice. The MPhil/PhD students of various disciplines, who were enrolled in the three-six years degree programmes in 2011-12, said that the HEC deprived them of the prime minister scholarship scheme for the underdeveloped areas and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government ignored them in the ‘Naway Sahar Laptop Scheme’.
The students were of the opinion that the prime minister scholarship had been announced in 2012 and their data had been sent to the HEC. But the students enrolled after them were provided the scholarship and they were ignored.
Similarly, the provincial government disbursed laptops to 25,000 students of BS and master’s degree programme and they were ignored in this project too despite the fact that the MPhil/PhD students needed laptops more than the students of junior classes.
The previous government had made the claim that every student of MPhil/PhD would be provided laptop but to no avail.
Now the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf-led current government has issued a notification to provide laptops to the MPhil and PhD students but this time too the students of the previous sessions were ignored.
The students demanded the chief minister to include them in the laptop scheme as their number is not that big. They also demanded the HEC chairman to consider them for the exemption from tuition fee in line with the prime minister scheme and overcome the sense of deprivation among them.
Source: The News.
