Interview with Professor Atta-ur-Rahman - Science in Pakistan

[ironman]

Two Parts.

‘You cannot survive unless you work together’

‘Our primary emphasis is on quality’

A fine one. Must read.

 

[ironman]

‘You cannot survive unless you work together’
R. RAMACHANDRAN
Interview with Professor Atta-ur-Rahman, president of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences.

“Atta-Ur-Rahman was a force of nature.” That was the comment Naveed Naqvi, a senior education economist at the World Bank, made in the prestigious journal Nature in an article it had carried in September 2010 on higher education in Pakistan. He was referring to the remarkable turnaround in higher education and research Professor Atta-ur-Rahman had brought as the Federal Minister of Science and Technology between 2000 and 2008 and as Chairman of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) and Adviser to the Prime Minister in 2002-08.

Between 2002 and 2008, there was a 60-fold increase in the development budget of the Ministry of S&T and a 24-fold increase in the development budget of the Ministry of Higher Education. He introduced dramatic changes in the salary structures of scientists. Under a new tenure track system, the salaries of professors were increased to over $5,000 a month, five times more than that of Ministers. He also gave performance-based incentive of 75 per cent tax waiver for university teachers. With an investment of $1 billion in the PhD programme, 11,000 foreign scholarships were given and each returning scholar was given a $100,000 research fund with a guaranteed job.

In a survey titled “A New Golden Age?” on the positive changes in some Islamic countries, the Royal Society (London) quoted Pakistan as the best practice model to be followed by other developing countries. Indeed, the reforms in Pakistan led Prof. C.N.R. Rao to remark in 2006 to a journalist, “Pakistan may soon join China in giving India serious competition in science. Science is a lucrative profession in Pakistan.”

With the change of regime in Pakistan, Atta-ur-Rahman returned to academics at the International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences in Karachi, but feels a little disappointed with the somewhat indifferent attitude to the reforms that he brought about under the current regime. Indeed, he wrote recently, “The Indian government need not be worried. We Pakistanis, alas, know how to destroy our own institutions.” But he has fought and prevented some of the attempted reversals from happening.

A product of Karachi University and King’s College, London, Atta-ur-Rahman is an organic chemist by profession and an expert in the chemistry of natural products. As the current president of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences (PAS), the 68-year-old Delhi-born scientist was in Delhi to attend the first South Asian Science Academies summit organised by the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) on September 6-9. In an interesting presentation at the summit, he gave a 10-point proposal to the eight academies that were present on how they could learn from one another’s experience. A man of action, he made an on-the-spot offer of 40 scholarships to spend up to three months in any Pakistani institution.

Excerpts from an interview he gave Frontline:

Professor Rahman, you had outlined a 10-point plan for possible cooperation among the science academies of the region. What among these should be the priority areas and which of these are feasible?

All the academies cannot obviously join together in a given programme. But a few can initially join together. Some programmes can have all the academies, but most programmes could be on a bilateral, trilateral or multilateral basis.

I think the easiest programme to implement is that of distance learning where no travel is involved and where we can share teaching by the best faculty members from a distance in a live interactive mode, a two-way process with students asking questions. We have this already up and running in Pakistan.

All our public sector universities have videoconferencing facilities and we have lectures being delivered in real time from the West and also by the best professors in the country. And this can be easily expanded to South Asian countries with hardly any effort.

Another programme that we could do together is on the issue of policies because academies are the think tanks for the government and they should be advising the government on policies. Specially, many South Asian countries do not have very clear innovation policies. A group needs to be put together to help individual countries formulate realistic and meaningful innovation policies and develop self-reliance.

A third area could be agriculture in which we have common problems of trying to improve yields and developing disease-resistant crops. There is a lot of experience in India and there is some experience in Pakistan and other South Asian countries. We could share those experiences and have a working group on specific crops. Information technology is another field. It has grown tremendously in India, and you are already reaping the fruits of the investments. Other countries are realising that this is a fast catch-up solution in many areas. It is a big equaliser. So, in the area of IT also we could share expertise and knowledge. India is now migrating to the higher end of IT exports leaving the way for many other countries in the areas of call centres and other lower value-added ends. This is one thing where other countries can benefit from the Indian experience.

So, proper mechanisms have to be laid down. As the President of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, I will be writing individually to all the academies proposing some programmes and see how many of them show interest in individual programmes and start them.

There have been long-standing political problems between India and Pakistan. In spite of there being an inter-academy memorandum of understanding between the two countries since January 2006, nothing significant seems to have come out of that. Now that the MoU has been renewed in January, what in your opinion lies ahead?

I think there should be much greater people-to-people interaction to pave the way. Be it in the area of commerce, business, education or science, inroads need to be made to develop closer interaction between India and Pakistan so that this concept of a country being an enemy gradually dissolves. Once people realise that we are all the same and genuinely desire cooperation and collaboration, the problems—a lot of them politically built up—will resolve themselves. In this world, you cannot survive unless you work together because our real enemies are poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy. These are the things that we should be fighting against together as comrades-in-arms. That is why I invited Professor Krishan Lal [president of the INSA] earlier this year. That was the first time the INSA president visited Pakistan, and now I am visiting [India]. I am here in Delhi along with my team of scientists so that we can develop some cooperation and collaboration. I have some wonderful friends [here] such as Prof. [R.A.] Mashelkar, Prof. Goverdhan Mehta and Prof. C.N.R. Rao. I have known them for decades, and it is a pleasure to be here, meet them and talk to them.

Did you initiate any high-level discussions on the sidelines of this summit along which we can proceed?

I was discussing with Prof. Krishan Lal that now that we have signed an MoU, it is time we started doing something on the basis of that because MoU is just hopes and aspirations and unless we start doing something concrete, it is not very meaningful.

Earlier Indian scientists used to go to Pakistan to attend the annual Nathiagali conference initiated by Abdus Salam [the International Nathiagali Summer Colleges on Physics and Contemporary Needs organised jointly by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and the National Centre for Physics, Islamabad]. I don’t think that they go there anymore. I don’t even know if the conference still takes place…

The programme is continuing but obtaining visas has been a problem. For instance, I was invited to the TWAS [Third World Academy of Sciences, Trieste, Italy] meeting in Hyderabad [in October 2010]. I was supposed to give the keynote lecture but I could not get a visa to go to Hyderabad although I am the regional vice-president of TWAS. Similarly, I was invited to go to Bangalore for another conference where your Prime Minister was there. But again I could not get a visa. It is in the last two-and-a-half years that this has happened to me. This time, I have a SAARC [South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation] visa and my colleagues also didn’t have a problem getting a visa. So I am delighted that it has been agreed between the two countries that they will ease visa restrictions and they are inking an agreement. This is a movement forward and I hope they make it simpler, easier for people to go across borders. Also the trade links are being strengthened which will help the two countries to interact. So, yes, there has been a problem and we need to realise and tackle that problem so that there is a greater scientific interaction and collaboration.

You have had a long-standing cooperation with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and this is quite active. What is the nature of cooperation with China and what has Pakistan gained from this?

China has invested in quite a number of initiatives in Pakistan. For example, it set up the Chasma nuclear power plant, it has been involved in the construction of dams and the Karakoram highway. We have a joint aircraft manufacturing facility. We have placed [in orbit] the second communication satellite, which was built in collaboration with China. So, there are many such collaborations. But these are actually not in the areas of education, teaching or joint research; more in large mega projects. I think that needs to also transform itself to include education and research in a collaborative manner. That is still largely missing and I had invited the President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They also visited us earlier this year and I will be going to China with some colleagues to see how we can further strengthen our cooperation with China just as we are trying to do with India.

Do you have exchange of scientists between Pakistan and China?

We do have some exchange but not at the level that we would like to have. This needs to be expanded significantly. For instance, my own genome was recently sequenced by Chinese scientists. I am the first person from the Islamic world whose genome was completely sequenced in a collaborative programme between my institute in Karachi, the International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences, and the Beijing Genome Institute. There is a genome centre coming up and we expect the Chinese scientists to be involved closely. We have a large number of students going to China. I had started a major scholarship programme to send students to top universities across the world and there are already a large number of students studying in top Chinese universities, Tsinghua and others, and we would like to do the same with India.

How do you get around the language problem for the students?

They learn Chinese for a year initially and then go for their education. Now I am planning to start a Chinese language programme through distance learning initiatives, which students in our universities could take, because this has opened up an opportunity that did not exist before. So that’s something we can start to facilitate for our students, not just at the university level but also at a lower level.

You are also the Coordinator-General of COMSTECH [Organisation of Islamic Countries’ Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation for the promotion and cooperation of science and technology activities]…

Yes, I have been heading COMSTECH for the past 16 years, which as you know comprises Ministers of Science from the 57 OIC [Organisation of the Islamic Conference] member-countries. My tenure expired at the end of June. But I continue to head the Network of Academies of Sciences of Islamic Countries.

What are your perceptions and perspective on the state of S&T and higher education in Islamic countries?

Generally it is a very poor state of affairs with the exception of Turkey, which has done quite well. Iran, too, has done well. Malaysia is doing well. Pakistan has improved considerably in the past decade. Egypt has a significant science base. Saudi Arabia has also been investing considerably in science in the past few years. But by and large it is still very low. But statistics are very interesting. The investment, as an average of the 57 countries, has increased to 0.46 per cent of the gross domestic product from 0.2 per cent 10 years ago. There is a very positive trend visible within the Islamic countries towards science now, and countries such as Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Qatar and the UAE are investing in a big way in science institutions.

What is your understanding of the phrase Islamic science that one often hears? One heard the phrase used in the presentations of some Islamic countries here.

This phraseology is just a lot of rubbish. There is no such thing as Jewish mathematics or Christian physics or Islamic science. This is all just a load of nonsense. I don’t believe in using such terminologies. Science is science. It is religion neutral. Of course, we can talk about the contributions made by Muslim scientists in the earlier era but that’s not Islamic science.

It is often said that in Islamic countries there is a clash between modern science and Islamic religious orthodoxy in terms of attitudes towards science.

This could be a perception because there are such people but we don’t have conferences on Islamic science in Pakistan and I don’t support the idea in any way.

In most Islamic countries finance itself does not seem to be a problem, particularly in oil-rich countries. But still progress in S&T seems to be slow and not commensurate with the available resources.

Finances are a problem because they are not putting the money in S&T. They have the money but they are not investing in science.

Is that due to the prevalent attitudes towards science?

There is an attitudinal problem and this is gradually changing. As I said in the last decade you have more money going in. But there is still a long way to go. Most of the countries spend far more on defence than they do on S&T. And in defence many of these oil-rich countries are buying expensive weapons, expensive fighter planes mainly from the United States and Europe.

Tens of billions of dollars are being spent unfortunately in buying these expensive toys, which will soon become outdated, and they want to buy more toys.

A lot of it is unfortunately corruption driven. Since much of the money in many cases goes to families, to their key people, there are dummy companies owned by various powerful people. So corruption unfortunately is also responsible for expenditure in defence-related materials. .

 

[ironman]

‘Our primary emphasis is on quality’
R. RAMACHANDRAN
Interview with Professor Atta-ur-Rahman, president of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences.


ATTA-UR-RAHMAN, a product of Karachi University and King’s College, Cambridge, is an organic chemist by profession and an expert in the chemistry of natural products. As the current President of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences (PAS), the 68-year-old Delhi-born scientist was in Delhi to attend the first South Asian Science Academies summit, organised by the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) on September 6-9. Excerpts from an interview he gave Frontline:

You have indicated in some of your writings that there was a fear of the significant reforms that were introduced when you were the Science Minister and the Chairman of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) getting destroyed or eroded owing to the change of regime in Pakistan. What recent developments in Pakistan suggest that?

Yes, there were some unfortunate developments since 2008 when I resigned and left. What happened was that the government decided to fragment the HEC and give the pieces to the provinces and keep some activities at the Centre as a part of devolution. I, at that time, stood up and said that this was illegal and unconstitutional. As the President of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences I held press conferences across the country and then I went to the Supreme Court of Pakistan and I appealed that this step by the government to break up the HEC was unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court upheld my appeal. So the HEC has not been affected as far as its legal entity is concerned. There has been a shortage of funding. The development funding for the universities through the HEC is about 40-50 per cent less than what it was supposed to be. But budgets go up and down with time. I hope this will revive with time.

What is, however, very heartening is that the policies of the HEC have not been altered. Usually when a person heading it goes, the new person who comes in says that everything that was done in the past was nonsense and we will start anew. But this has not happened in the case of the HEC. I was initially replaced by Begum Shahnaz Wazir Ali, who belongs to the Pakistan People’s Party [PPP], which is the party in power. She was an acting Chairperson for one year. I do not have any political affiliations. I am neutral and I am a scientist. She praised the reforms that I had brought in. She was replaced by another, who was a senator in the PPP, Dr Javed Laghari. He has also continued with the same policies. This is broadly what has happened in the recent past. It is heartening that they are not starting from zero. There is a continuity of policies although there has been a shortage of funds; as a result some of the programmes have been affected.

But it seems that the larger autonomy that the HEC perhaps enjoyed earlier is curtailed because it is now under some Ministry and probably the budget comes from that Ministry.

They tried to do that. They said that the HEC would work under the Ministry of Manpower Development and Training. Then there was an appeal. A case was filed in the Sind High Court. The court stopped that from happening. Now both the HEC and the Ministry have agreed that it will function, as in the past, with the Ministry of Education. Actually, the HEC was never under the Ministry of Education; there was only a collaborative mechanism. So they have agreed that the same collaborative mechanism will now continue with the new Ministry. So I think that has been sorted out.

Has a scaling down of the significantly higher salaries for scientists or the tenure track programme that you put in place been affected?

No. That is all going on. There has been no change in that. There has, however, been a scaling down of the scholarship programmes. Some major development schemes of the universities for new departments and institutions have been affected adversely by the curtailment of funds. But the core programmes are continuing, which include the higher salary structures, the tenure track programme, the research grants programme and the distance learning initiative.

How successful has been this tenure track initiative?

Oh! It has been outstandingly successful. Initially, there was a lot of resistance to it when I brought it in. There is an interesting article by Fred Hayward and there is also a report by the USAID which, in fact, says that initially there was a lot of resistance to much of the reforms, but Professor Fred Hayward representing the USAID was one of a team of five or six. But when he visited Pakistan three or four years later he saw how changed the whole situation was, and people who were initially against the reforms were now totally in favour. This was a neutral international comment being made. Professor Fred Hayward’s observations are there in this report by the USAID.

One of the people who criticised it was Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy.

I think he misunderstood the whole programme. What I had said was that within my tenure I would increase PhD output from 200 a year to 1,500 a year. I was talking about total PhDs from both within Pakistan and abroad and I met this target. By the time I left in 2008, we were producing about 800-900 in foreign countries and 600 from Pakistan. If you try to expand the PhD output, then quality is affected. So I introduced reforms ensuring that all theses were evaluated by international experts and I also checked plagiarism by distributing software. So our primary emphasis was on quality. But this was not properly understood. Hoodbhoy said that we were just looking at numbers rather than quality.

In fact, if you look at the USAID report, it says that they were very pleasantly surprised that our emphasis was on quality rather than numbers, and this is borne out by the fact that although the PhD output went down initially when we enforced quality, it started going up subsequently. They visited various universities and have made very detailed comments. There are always people who are for you or against you in everything. In the final analysis, it is the neutral international observers whose opinion is more valuable because it is an external peer review that has been carried out. Ultimately, the results are before you. Those are statistics that you can look up in the web of science. These are facts and no one can argue about them.

Pakistan has 10 times more publications today compared with what it had seven or eight years ago. It has 1,000 per cent increase in citations. It has more than a tripling of enrolment—from 270,000 we are now about a million students.

Do you have problem in identifying quality teachers?

This is the single biggest problem in Pakistan and that’s why we spend most of our money in identifying the brightest for scholarship programmes by having a national examination every three months. Only students who had a good academic career are allowed to appear. Through the exams, we identified the best 500 each quarter, which means about 2,000 every year, and we invited professors from abroad for final selection through personal interviews. This was a mechanism with nobody from the government sitting in and that ensured complete transparency, and so you know it is all done on merit basis. Some 11,000 foreign scholarships were given. About 5,000 of them were for PhDs and the others for split PhD programmes and Master’s programmes, and so on, and this has changed the university system to a great extent because people are coming back in 95 per cent plus numbers because we have increased the salaries, and we have increased research grants.

We have to create the right enabling environment and not just legal bonds. So they are making a huge difference to the university system and the set-ups that we have at the moment because the emphasis is on high-quality faculty. Competition and quality assurance have also helped to raise standards—ranking everybody; giving research productivity allowances to those who are publishing in international journals; ranking all universities on a regular basis; closing down substandard universities; laying minimum criteria for the formation of new universities, like PhD. level faculty, facilities, infrastructure, library facilities and cabinet approval.

Perhaps the single most important way to implement these programmes and get the muscle that I needed to push this through in such a short period of time was by forming a Chancellors’ Committee, which had the President of Pakistan as the head; the Prime Minister who is the chancellor of some university; the Governors of the four provinces, who are the chancellors of the provincial universities; and the Chief Ministers of the four provinces, who are the executive arms, along with the Finance Minister, the Finance Secretary and myself, who were also invited.

The committee used to meet regularly and take decisions. Once a decision was made by the committee, bureaucrats at lower levels could not question them. That helped me to push through the reforms. Because people often ask me, how did you do it? In a developing country, who listens to the Minister of Science? The Ministry of Science is usually the weakest Ministry.

Another thing is that President [Pervez] Musharraf was strongly supportive because I was blunt, straightforward; I was not a ‘yes man’, I am a scientist. That’s what I have done all my life, and he respected that. I said that I am going to be very blunt with you. Whenever there is a problem I am going to come to you and you have to solve it. I will never ask anything for myself and I must say that he was very supportive throughout. Even when he was not the Chief Executive—we had the democratic system coming in with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and others—he remained the President and was always supportive and whatever I achieved, it was also because of the constant support and trust that I had from the President himself.

You had this “Foresight Exercise”. What came out of that?

Yes. I had carried out one and it was a 300-page document, which was approved by the Cabinet in August 2006. That had provided guidelines to the provincial governments, but within a year of that there was a change of government in 2008. Unfortunately, while some of the things have been implemented, others have not, because I think it was considered as the activity of the past government. But various political parties have asked for that, they are looking at it very carefully. So I hope in time it will be implemented.

You had also drawn up a 15-year road map for the future of Pakistan’s S&T and higher education. What about that?

The 15 years were broken into three five-year periods with clear-cut identification of projects in each field—what are we to do, what time frame, what costs, what impact on national economy, etc. This was in 2007. Very few projects have been taken up, but mostly it is not implemented.

Do you think it will be on track some time?

I hope so because the momentum that I had generated is now irreversible. This is apparent from the fact that when they tried to break up the HEC and I stood up and started having press conferences all over, the whole country rose up with me.

All the 72 vice-chancellors unanimously passed a resolution against the devolution of the HEC. The students came out on the streets saying that we would not allow this. Then the political parties, except for the PPP, came out in my favour when they saw that this was the general trend. Finally, the government had to yield because I went to the Supreme Court and got a decision.

Some of the other political remarks in your writings are probably perceived as controversial. You have said that the development process was much better during the military regimes of President Ayub Khan and President Pervez Musharraf.

I was just mentioning the fact that this is a statistical truth and anybody can look up the statistics and the GDP growth rate of Pakistan under successive democratic regimes and military regimes. I am not at all in favour of being governed by the army. I am a democrat. I would like to see democracy come into Pakistan. But the kind of democracy that we have had, unfortunately, has been such that military regimes, in spite of all their shortcomings, have done much better. The reasons are mainly twofold. One is that we have a strong feudal system, which was broken up in India by Jawaharlal Nehru and in Bangladesh by the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, this has not happened in Pakistan and we have a stranglehold of the feudal system. And related to this is the massive illiteracy and that means that elections have become a farce. Even in the last elections that took place, the Election Commission said that 45 per cent of the votes cast were fake.

In the case of Pakistan, I am in favour of a presidential system of democracy like the one that they have in France or in the United States, where you select one person and then he selects his own team from wherever he likes and is not confined to Parliament. The way forward is a democratic system, not the army, but a different form of democracy. Rather than relying on the masses choosing a Parliament and then [the Cabinet] being confined to Ministers selected from that Parliament, there should be direct elections of the President who then chooses his own team. So there needs to be a modulation. And also, I believe that bodies such as the Pakistan International Airlines or the Pakistan Steel Mills or other organisations should have their own governing boards, independent of the government. There should be no interference from the government.

But in developing countries, faced with sharp rich-poor divisions, caste structures, poverty and illiteracy, how do you ensure that governance under such presidential democratic systems is inclusive and equitable across all sections of society?

First, the system that I am suggesting is that Parliament should be confined to the process of law-making, which means that it should have a certain level of literacy and not everybody can be elected. Perhaps they should set aside a certain percentage of seats for farmers and people like that to ensure certain representation from all quarters, but the majority of parliamentarians should be highly educated so that they have a certain level of understanding of law and can contribute. Then Parliament should have oversight of all the activities, which also happens in the parliamentary system to ensure that if there is anything wrong, then the parliamentary committees have an oversight of what is going on.

But people who are coming in at key positions of the government should be completely independent of respective governments. I have suggested that there should be a judicial committee of elders, which should screen these people to see if they have clean character and career and if they are suitable. Only then they should be allowed to hold key positions in the government or run large public sector organisations.

Now that Musharraf has also been talking of coming back, are you thinking of getting back into the role of a Science Minister at some point of time?

I am not a politician. I have never contested elections. I am quite happy doing my research in my lab and having fun in my science. I would like to contribute in whatever little way I can through advisories, through consultancies. I have no aspirations of becoming a Minister. I never had in the first place. I was on a lecture tour to Japan when I got this call from President Musharraf that he wanted me as a Minister. When I came back and asked him, “Are you serious?”, he said yes, and I asked, “How serious are you?” He asked how serious I wanted him to be and I gave him figures and told him that this was how serious I wanted him to be and said, “If you are serious about science, put your money where your mouth is.” And as a result we had tremendous support from him.

For me science and education is a passion and that is what I would like to continue to do in whatever little way I can. I write articles for Dawn every Sunday, called “The Wondrous World of Science”. I have written 162 articles and the first 100 have been compiled into a book and published recently. I also write articles for The News—I have written about 20 articles so far. I have just started writing for The Herald Tribune. I just like to, at least convey my ideas of the way forward.

Thank you Professor Rahman.

 

[somebozo]

Now PPP government is busy increasing minister salaries and waiving their taxes..Pakistan Khappay..seriously!

 

[niaz]

I am pleased to hear what Dr Ata ur Rahman had to say. I happened to come across him once on the plane from Karachi to Dubai and was very impressed by his scholarship.

No country can prosper without advances in Science & Technology. Unfortunately with idiots like Dr Shaukat Pervez heading the PCSIR (who was duped by the water kit car scam) you can’t expect any good coming out of that institution. We need more Dr Ata ur Rahmans and Pervez Hoodbhoys.