The British Council’s recent report on ‘The university research system in Pakistan’ presents a disappointing state of knowledge economy in the country. It lays bare how unstructured, unfunded, broken and fragmented is Pakistan’s research industry across the spectrum of demand, supply, and intermediation of knowledge economy.
As an indication of progress, the country’s Higher Education Commission (HEC) oft touts the growth in the number of research publications by Pakistani researchers from about 800 in 2002 to over 12,000 today. Similar, trends are shown for the growing number of ‘PhD’ faculty, number of universities, and the number of university students in Pakistan.
But don’t be fooled by these numbers. When it comes to research it’s the quality rather than the quantity that matters - a concept clearly lost on Pakistan’s university research system, as has been well argued by the report’s authors former Planning Commission head, Dr Nadeem ul Haque, et al, and many other critics (such as Pervez Hoodbhoy) before.
On the supply side, the issues range from flawed incentive structures in the academia to lack of collaboration among universities, and between the universities and other stakeholders such as government, businesses, think tanks and other facets of society. On the intermediation side, the research industry lacks an understanding of the importance of press and media (although the same could be said vice versa) as well as the will and wherewithal for other means of dissemination such as public seminars, debating societies and discussion forums.
The demand side - reasoned to be the driver of modern economics since the notion that ‘supply will create its own demand’ was refuted some decades ago – is the most problematic in Pakistan. Both the government and businesses - two of the biggest domestic drivers of research demand in any half decent country – have no real incentives to create a demand for research in Pakistan.
The government doesn’t demand research for producing, implementing and monitoring its policies since public accountability mechanisms, re-election prospects, politically active citizenry, and other cogs of a well-oiled democratic system are either weak or do not exist in Pakistan. Case in the point: the HEC which should be setting inspiring benchmarks for other government departments and institutions “doesn’t publicly provide data on its scholarship budget”; it publishes “minimal data on the return on investment of its foreign scholarship programme”; and “does not regularly commission research on its operations or on the university system”.
Has any education minister in Pakistan ever been fired by any head of government or at least not elected again by the public for failing to deliver on education? Has there been any media outcry or public brouhaha on such affairs? What more could exemplify the problem than the fact that the report in consideration was made possible by the British Council rather than the HEC or any other of the government itself? Ah! If it weren’t for the white man’s burden!
The businesses on the other hand are happy being “65-year old infants” as Dr Nadeem had once put it, comfortably feeding on government support behind the protective wall of tariffs. Being open to competition regardless, businesses have devised an assortment of ways and means to cheat on taxes, utility bills, and so forth - ensuring that they enjoy enough return on investments that they don’t really have to seek research and innovation to beat out their competitors. It is embarrassing to note that even three years into the CPEC – the biggest game changer of all times for Pakistan - none of the business chambers and associations, business schools or even the government’s so-called CPEC centres of excellence can boast even a single piece of credible, globally respectable research on a subject as elementary as say comparative analyses of cost and supply of key factor inputs in key economic sectors. Let alone more complex areas of study!
The report advocates the need to create an ongoing system of peer evaluation, developing peer networks through conferences, seminars, etc for critical discussion on ongoing research activities. Such networks and nodes are indeed important. But at its heart really, there is a need for a social change towards a continuous self-critiquing pursuit of perceived truth rather than relying blindly on received truth. When the social mores are such that the father is always right and everybody knows everything, then why bother research.
How can a people change the social-psychological framework of their society from ‘possessing all the knowledge’ to a constant pursuit of reason is something that social scientists can research on (should they like and should they receive funding from the HEC), but historically it has been for a society’s philosophers, poets, revolutionary thinkers to deliver on that task. And that cannot be funded by the white man!
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