ISLAMABAD:
Pakistan may soon face a severe human resource crisis in its public universities as the country’s highly qualified researchers and faculty members are on the verge of attrition due to a freeze on their salaries since 2021 and an 81% increase in their tax burden.
These highly qualified researchers and professors, employed under the Tenure Track System (TTS), received their last salary increase in 2021 and since then have faced at least three major inflationary increases, including the record high inflation rate of 38%.
The last recruitment under TTS was made in 2020. Since then, these specialized professionals have been facing attrition, with no increase in their salaries, according to details submitted to the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Planning and the Senate Standing Committee on Finance.
Finance Minister Bilal Kayani also held a meeting with the representatives on Tuesday, but no final solution was agreed upon, apart from a temporary relief promised by the finance ministry, according to meeting participants.
The Ministry of Finance conveyed that it would support a one-off increase in salaries, but the increase would be given by excluding certain allowances that minimize the real effect for educators.
TTS, a performance-based, contract-based faculty tenure system, was introduced in 2002 to attract high-quality doctoral researchers to public universities with a commitment to pay them double compared to full-time professors.
But instead of getting any benefit, their pay has been frozen since 2021, these details showed.
These highly-educated people have been marginalized despite their exceptionally good performance, providing the country with foreign grants for educational projects and improvements in university rankings due to their research publications.
In 2021, the minimum salaries were Rs175,500 for an assistant professor, Rs263,250 for an associate professor and Rs394,875 for a professor. These wages have remained unchanged since then, while the income tax burden has risen by 81% over the past five years, alongside a sharp rise in prices.
If regular increments had been applied over the past five years, an assistant professor would now earn Rs 328,000 a month, an associate professor Rs 492,000 and a professor Rs 738,000, according to a presentation given to the Senate Standing Committee on Finance last month.
Although the specialized category professors did not get annual increments, the increment they received was barely 5% per year.
According to a briefing given to the Treasury Department and the Senate Standing Committee on Finance, prices increased by 87% and the tax burden increased by 81% for the TTS category, but they did not get any salary increases.
The researchers and faculty members were not an exception like other wage earners in Pakistan who are forced to cough up more taxes every year. But the worst thing for the TTS-based employees was that they paid more in taxes without getting higher wages due to increases in tax rates and changes in tax slabs.
Compared to this, faculty hired on the government pay scale received a 71% salary increase, which was barely enough to offset the impact of inflation, but was much better than TTS faculty.
Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal-led committee had also tried to solve their problems, but his recommendations have not been heeded by the finance ministry.
The standing committee had been informed that there were about 4,000 faculty members who have not received any salary hike in the past five years, which has raised concerns among stakeholders.
Chairman Association of Pakistan Tenure Track Teachers (APTTA), Dr. Asif Ali said the body was in discussions with the finance department since November last year to get revision in their salaries.
He further said that a special task force set up in 2023, headed by the Planning Minister, had also formulated recommendations in line with the association’s position.
The Iqbal Task Force recommended that the TTS pay structure be benchmarked against the Basic Pay Scale (BPS) framework as used by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), based on the applicable BPS structure for FY 2025-26, with a premium of 35% over the gross BPS-based pay to be allowed as TTS allowance to ensure competitive compensation.
But these recommendations were never implemented.
An additional finance secretary took a position in the parliamentary committee that, although the matter was not a legally binding requirement, the government supported the proposed adjustments and the matter was under consideration. He informed that efforts were being made to expedite the matter, although no final timetable had been finalized.
