KARACHI, Sept 21: With a total strength of about 13,500 students, the Urdu arts and science colleges are all set to start functioning as campuses of the Federal Urdu University of Arts, Sciences and Technology, Karachi.

The federal cabinet on Friday approved the charter for the setting up of the Urdu University with its headquarters in Islamabad.

Sources said efforts were being made to launch the new university formally within a couple of months.

The government would first move to constitute the senate and syndicate of the university as allowed under the approved charter, while information technology faculty would be introduced later on.

It is further learnt that the President of Pakistan will be the chancellor of the university, and the chairman of the Higher Education Commission, will be the pro-chancellor.

The senate would be headed by an official to be named as the deputy chairman of senate.

Apart from government nominees, ex-officio officers and representatives of public and industrial sector, the nominees of the Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu Pakistan would also be included in the senate and syndicate of the university.

On an initiatives by the federal minister for science and technology, Dr Atta-Ur-Rehman, who had been working on a plan to establish an information technology university, the president of Pakistan approved a proposal for raising the status of Federal Government Urdu Science College to that of a science and technology university.

However, at some later stage, quarters concerned moved the government for enlarging the scope of the university and urged the government to also include the Urdu Arts College in its proposed university project.

In view of two separate letters from the miniseries of education and science and technology in August, the competent authority allowed the inclusion of two federal government-run Urdu colleges of Karachi in the government’s plan for setting up an Urdu arts, sciences and technology university.

Under the charter, Urdu language would be the medium of instruction, while idioms and terminologies in English could also be adopted for teaching and research purposes.

There is also a likelihood, that some more Urdu colleges be established in any part of the country, which would be granted affiliation by the Urdu university.

Sources said the government had already been providing a funds to the tune of Rs 75 million annually to two Urdu colleges, and it would not find any difficulty in running a fully fledged arts and sciences university immediately.

The Urdu Arts College was established by Baba-i-Urdu Moulvi Abdul Haq in 1949 as a part of his drive to set up an Urdu university in the country.

Initially the college was set up on three acres by the Baba-i-Urdu and later another piece of land, measuring 24 acres was acquired in Gulshan-i-Iqbal in 1964 where Urdu Science College started functioning within a period of two years.

A couple of science laboratories were also established at the college with the help of China.

The colleges were taken over by the provincial government under the government’s nationalization policy 1973, but later the two premises were adopted by the federal government and thus the colleges continued to function with their own resources as well as from the federal grants.

Today, the arts college imparts education in Urdu, English, Islamic studies, education, political science, library translation and compilation, law, commerce, psychology, geography and Sindhi, while at the Urdu Science College, the departments of physics, chemistry, biology, maths, statistics, geology, economics, earth sciences exist.

Presently the two colleges are affiliated with the University of Karachi, and there are 103 teachers and 7,653 students at the Urdu Arts College, and about 130 teachers and 6,000 students at Urdu Science College.

The two colleges generate a total of Rs 11 million on their own annually.

With regard to funding for the university, a keen observer said the government would have to increase a little of its already permissible subsidiaries or grants to the colleges, while after going functional as independent varsity campuses, the two institutions would be able to increase their income further and would also be able to save money what was being paid to the KU on account of examinations.

Meanwhile, the honorary secretary of Anjuman Taraqqi-i- Urdu, Dr Jamiluddin Aali, has lauded the government for granting charter to the Urdu university and hoped that the university would be able to arrange teaching in Urdu of any subject or faculty.

The ultimate beneficiaries would be students coming from middle and lower middle income groups, he said, adding a dream of Sir Syed and Baba-i-Urdu has come true.