The mushroom growth of substandard private universities, negligible research facilities and the curricula, which had not been revised for the last 30 years, have deteriorated the education standard, said Dr Attaur Rahman, Chairman, Higher Education Commission, (HEC).
Dr Atta said this while speaking at the inaugural ceremony of an international conference on 'Recent Developments in Fluid Mechanics' at Quaid-e-Azam university here on Monday.
"Education has lost its real essence just because of the substandard institutes and universities lack of uniform Curricula. The HEC had inherited a myriad of problems at its inception, which included quality issues and lack of sufficient infrastructure for universities", he told the audience.
He said that not a single research project had been rejected due to lack of funds. All research projects proposals have to go through strong peer review and are approved after thorough vetting, he explained.
He said HEC was in the favour of linkages with universities abroad. Pakistani universities already have 50 linkages with British universities. Apart from strengthening institutional infrastructure, HEC had provided universities' access to over 23,000 free online journals, video-conferencing facilities, research and travel grants, put in place a quality criteria and provided scholarships to 2000 students to study abroad, he recalled.
"Fluid mechanics or fluid dynamics is all about studying macroscopic physical behaviour of fluids. It is one of the most important subjects of human interest. It encompasses hydrodynamics, magneto hydrodynamics, vortex dynamics, gas dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, glaciology, geomagnetism and mantel convection, he said.
Dr Qasim Jan, Vice Chancellor of Quaid-i-Azam University, said the conference aimed at providing a forum to advance the frontiers of knowledge and cross fertilisation of ideas among scientists.
"The conference will provide an opportunity to researchers for exchanging their ideas and techniques and non-liner science and its complexity", he said. He said we need to have more research upon the topics like peristalsis, blood flow, gliding motility of bacteria, mathematical modelling, mathematical methods, industrial and environmental heat and mass transfer, and mechanics of the porous substrate.