HEC showed resentment over the budget cut executed by the government. As per promise, government was supposed to allocate Rs. 70 billion to the HEC as a recurring grant for fiscal year 2020-21 but the government did not keep the promise and allotted Rs. 64.1 billion for HEC this year.
HEC showed resentment over the budget cut executed by the federal government. As per promise, government was supposed to allocate Rs. 70 billion to the Higher Education Commission (HEC) as a recurring grant for fiscal year 2020-21 but the federal government did not keep the promise and allotted Rs. 64.1 billion for HEC this year.
The federal HEC had demanded an allocation of Rs 104.789 billion as recurring grant for fiscal year 2020-2021 but the government promised to allocate Rs 70 billion and the same was witnessed by the HEC recently.
However, when the government presented its budget it surprisingly turned out that the Commission had to face a shortage of Rs 6 billion.
This has come as a surprise for the Commission itself which has now decided to take up the same with the government seriously.
Most importantly the government had reserved Rs 64.1 billion for HEC as recurring budget for the 2019-2020 fiscal year which means there is no increase in the recurring grant for the HEC for the new fiscal year.
Likewise, against the demand of Rs 42.6 billion as development budget, the federal government allocated Rs 29.4 to the Higher Education Commission under the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) 2020-2021.
The recent allocation for development is almost Rs 400 million more than the allocation for previous fiscal year when the government had allocated slightly over Rs 29 billion against the demand of Rs 33.5 billion.
The HEC had planned its budgetary requirements on “funds for universities, pursuing it research agenda, start of several new initiatives including NAHE, ETC, HEMIS, PERU, and P-15 Research Universities, funding for the Tenure Track Faculty, funding for the Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN), and the resources needed to meet Covid-19 related challenges”.
Also, the federal HEC has already decided in principle that due to reduction of funds no new university was being added to recurring grant stream of HEC during fiscal year 2020-2021.
At the same time, the Federation of All Pakistan Universities Academic Staff Associations (FAPUASA) has shown serious concerns over the HEC budget cut. FAPUASA Punjab chapter president Prof Dr Mumtaz Anwar Ch demanded that the government is supposed allocate budget to the HEC as per its demand to save universities from further crisis in the future.