HARIPUR, June 8: Vice-Chancellor of Hazara University (HU) Dr Ehsan Ali has said that the university would produce 400 PhDs during the next four years.

This he said while talking to this Correspondent at Haripur campus of the varsity here the other day.

He said that currently the HU had 62 PhDs while 52 candidates were studying at the prominent universities of UK, USA, Canada, Germany and other developed countries who were expected to raise the number of total PhDs at the HU to well over 100, thus helping the varsity to place itself among the prominent universities of the country, he added.

The present national ranking of HU was 9th out of 157 universities of the country, he said.

Under the rules, he said, a PhD could register four to five candidates with him/her and by doing so the 100 PhDs of the HU would be producing at least 400 PhDs during the next three to four years. He added that currently 134 candidates were doing PhD in the disciplines of Botany, Genetics, Education, Chemistry and Biochemistry. He said that about 60 to 70 new candidates would also be sent abroad in near future for the purpose.

Besides, he said that the HU would soon provide the facility to the candidates seeking PhD degrees in Management Sciences, Tourism Management and different disciplines of medical sciences.

The HU vice-chancellor said, when he took over the varsity had only eight departments and two campuses of Havelian and Haripur while some new departments, like Law, Mathematics & IT, technical education, and contemporary languages were in the pipeline. He termed the Genetics, Chemistry and Biochemistry departments of HU as among the few top departments of country's higher education institutions.

He said that the Hazara division had some big industrial zones but the locals were not getting jobs because they did not have the required technical education, so to bridge this gap the HU would soon launch its technical education department.

To a question Dr Ali said for exchange of faculty, research work and students, the HU had signed MoUs with some known universities of UK, USA, France, Germany, Korea and Canada that would help the students and researches of the HU in different ways.

Dr Ali who is himself a known archeologist said that since Hazara was rich with archeological sites the HU had established two museums -- one at main campus of Mansehra and the second at Abbottabad -- while the Haripur museum was at its initial stage of construction.

He said that the Haripur campus had five departments currently while the efforts were on to develop it into a full fledge university. He added that that PhD programme was also being launched at the Haripur campus during the coming fiscal year.

He said that the archeological department should be decentralised and the antiquities belonged to the NWFP be given in the control of the frontier archeology department.

He demanded that a separate museum should be set up at Khanpur, and that thousands of antiquities lying in the museums of Taxila, Peshawar and Swat, which were not displayed so far, should be placed at this museum because they were excavated from Khanpur.