Islamabad: The ongoing saga of verification of lawmakers' degrees seems to be taking much longer time than expected because the universities concerned are finding it difficult to do the assignment as per advised by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of the country.

Three deadlines - July 13, July 16 and July 27- have already passed and out of nearly one thousand documents, the universities have till now verified academic testimonials of 270 lawmakers and out of these 224 proved are found and 46 fake. HEC chairman Dr Javaid Leghari said: "I can't say with surety when the ongoing process will be completed as the commission will not accept verification of the documents that is not done as per its requirement."

Yes, it is true the HEC has sent back initial report of the Sindh University in which it had given a clean chit to all its 108 graduate lawmakers. It had asked the varsity to follow the HEC's criterion, the HEC chairperson said.

Dr Leghari contradicted the statement of Vice Chancellor of the Sindh University, Dr Mughal, who said on Wednesday that the university had completed degrees' verification. The Sindh University, in its first report, had only checked the BA degrees of the lawmakers.

Dr Leghari said that the HEC was facing the same problem about the academic documents of 600 to 700 members of parliament and provincial assemblies because relevant universities were not having required set of documents. In total, 36 degree-awarding universities are involved in the process of degrees' verification.

"We need verification of not only their (lawmakers') BA degrees, but also of matric and intermediate certificates besides checking of their computerised national identity cards," the HEC chairman said.

Dr Leghari said that the HEC had asked universities to use whatever means; direct correspondence with lawmakers, by writing to their respective speakers or employing their own resource, but the commission wanted verification as per its format.

About the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) officials' contention that the HEC was not responding to their correspondence on the subject, Dr Leghari said that he was yet to receive any formal letter from the election commission. As soon as the ECP wrote something formally, the HEC would respond accordingly, Dr Leghari said. Dawn