LAHORE:Governor Punjab Muhammad Balighur Rehman has said that the provincial government is constantly violating rules in making laws, and awarding new charters to private universities without scrutiny and such cases had made him return some legislative pieces without signing it.
In an interview with reporter here on Wednesday, he said there was rationale and not bias behind returning certain government bills, as those were rife with mistakes and violated the policies, adding that if the government would reconsider the drafts sympathetically, it would be the larger public interest.
Governor Muhammad Balighur Rehman spoke at length on the rationale behind returning the government legislation, good governance in universities, poor academic standards of affiliated colleges and role of academia in grappling with climate change.
He stressed that the Governor’s Office did not have any bias towards the government legislation, adding that 90 per cent of the daily business gets his assent the same day.
“Opinion of the law ministry, the ministry concerned and the cabinet must be sought before a bill is routed to the Governor’s Office, but the practice has been abandoned since 2021, and bills are forwarded to the Governor’s Office directly without seeking expert opinion and the fact leaves much to be desired,” Balighur Rehman added.
The Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA) Bill was returned without approval as its board did not include a single woman, while the law required that a board must give five per cent representation to women. Similarly, the government did not elaborate on the perks of the chairperson, Punjab Commission on the Status of Women in the Bill and the salary package of MP1 status was removed from the previous draft. The absence of salary package created ambiguity. The bill was returned and the government was asked to clearly mention the salary scale so that nobody gets undue benefits in future.
He said the Punjab Local Government (Amendment) bill had blurred the rural and urban divide in the province, and it also ignored seniority of officers in appointment to the department.
To another query, Governor Balighur Rehman said charters were being awarded to private universities in haste, and without due diligence, and the process was to detrimental to quality of education.
Recalling his stint as Education Minister in 2013-18, he said that private sector universities were granted charter only after detailed input from the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Punjab Higher Education Commission (PHEC) and the Higher Education Department (HED), adding that unfortunately, process of scrutiny was being bypassed partially and in some cases fully to the disadvantage of education.
Expressing his deep concern over absence of rules in certain educational institutions, he said the university rules were not being framed in time and it adversely effected performance of the higher education institutions, adding that same was the case with Aitchison College and Lawrence College, where the rules had not been framed despite lapse of almost two years.
The Punjab governor said that as chancellor of public sector universities, he was perturbed due to temporary appointments against statutory posts in universities, adding that to ensure good governance, it was vital to have regular appointees against posts of registrar, controller of examination, deans, treasurer and the vice chancellors.
He said that since absence of regular appointees impacted good governance, it was decided during the last tenure of Chief Minister Hamza Shehbaz that a vice chancellor would be given a six-month extension if the administration could not process the new appointment with only one more extension of three months, and a new person would be posted on ‘acting charge basis’ in case no one was selected during these nine months. He said the Punjab chief minister had been asked to follow the policy decision in vice-chancellors appointments.
Governor Balighur Rehman, to another query, said the affiliated colleges which were compromising the academic standards should be warned and subsequently closed down in order to protect rights of students so that quality of education was not undermined.
On climate change, the governor said: “I had floated the idea of fighting climate change through universities long before the flash floods hit Pakistan,” adding that there was need to mobilise the academia in that regard.
Referring to vice chancellors’ conference in Murree recently, he said the vice chancellors had been given the target to come up with short- and long-term solutions to the climate challenge, adding that the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences (UVAS) had the best climate change experts.