Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Islamabad
Higher Education Commission’s (HEC) expensive and hectic online degrees verification process has become a permanent source of inconvenience for students, who intend to move abroad for further education or for the sake of job.
The limited capacity of attestation department of Higher Education Commission (HEC) and the annoying behaviour of its staff are causing anxiety for the students who come from different parts of the country to get their degrees attested. Due to negligence on part of the authorities concerned, the commission has not so far devised any appropriate strategy in this regard, it is further learnt. Moreover, HEC has reportedly started fleecing the students in the name of hefty degrees’ attestation fees. It is pertinent to mention here that when the commission was established back in 2002 there was no condition of fee submission for attestation.
Director Attestation and Equivalence department of HEC, Dr Abid Ali, when approached by TheNation, said that all dues being collected by the Commission directly went to national exchequer. To a query, he replied that tickets pasted on the students’ degrees were quite expansive.
He said that they (Directorate employees) worked day and night to accommodate the students, so it was also their responsibility to come on time for this purpose. He said that it was wrong perception that HEC was accumulating profit through attestation process adding the students submitted thousands of rupees in embassies of numerous countries like the US and Saudi Arabia but they objected to HEC criterion for the same. Majority came at the last moment without proper documents thus creating hurdles for the staff, he added. The Nation
