Profiles in Leadership (3): Atta ur Rahman on HEJ, HEC, and OIC Science Cooperation

Public Policy

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By: Dr. Athar Osama

localhost/muslim talked with Dr. Atta ur Rahman, the Coordinator General of OIC Standing Committee on Science and Technology Cooperation (COMSTECH), and the  former Minister of Science and Technology and Chairman of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. Since his resignation from Higher Education Commission in 2008, Dr. Rahman’s energies have focused on his role at COMSTECH. However, he still holds office at the Husein Ebrahim Jamal (HEJ) Research Institute of Chemistry whose reigns he handed over to his portege Dr. Mohammad Iqbal Chaudhary in late-1990s.

Between 1999 and 2008, Dr. Rahman enjoyed a unique and  close intellectual alliance with the then Military Ruler General Pervez Musharraf (in the manner of two similar alliances elsewhere in the Muslim World, namely, Mahathir – Omar Abdur Rahman in Malaysia and Suharto – Habibi in Indonesia) and delivered a massive set of reforms that have been a subject of much debate and controversy. On the one hand, Dr. Rahman is much loved and admired for enhancing the quantum (and quality) of scientific research, especially university-led scientific research, in Pakistan and providing the country with a foothold within the global scientific enterprise which can be built upon and, on the other hand, he faces harsh criticism and allegations from some of his fiercest critics who accuse him of comprising quality for quantity and high handedness in implementing his reform agenda. Undeterred by these distractions, Dr. Rahman moves on with implementing and supporting his ambitious agenda and the values that he ardently believes in.

The Government of Pakistan’s recent decision to devolve the Higher Education Commission to the provinces has brought fresh energy and perspective to Dr. Rahman’s struggle. As its first and founding Chairman, Dr. Rahman has come out in the favor of his brainchild with much ferocity and passion. Knowing him and his remarkable energy, it is unlikely that Dr. Rahman will let HEC go without a spirited fight.

localhost/muslim’s conversation with Dr. Atta ur Rahman puts a number of these issues in perspective. Carried out over four sittings in January 2010, June 2010, February 2011, and March 2011 comprising between 60-90 minutes each and predates the current crisis involving HEC’s devolution and focuses instead on his formative influences, his early life as a researcher, the challenges of his work as a policy-maker at MOST and HEC, his views on politics, and his current role as Coordinator General of COMSTECH. This interview is being produced below for the benefit of localhost/muslim’s audience.

Muslim Science (MS): We’ve all had some exposure to Atta ur Rahman the policy-maker but very few people know you as a person. Please tell us about Atta ur Rahman – the person – your early influences, your experiences during university days in the UK?

Atta ur Rahman (AUR): I was born in Sept 1942 in Delhi. My grand father was Sir Abdur Rahman who was the former Vice Chancellor of University of Delhi (from 1934-38) and later a judge at Madras High Court. He also represented India in the Palestine Commission. He moved to Pakistan in 1947 and became a Judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. So, I came from a fairly educated background. My father, however, went into business and we had cotton ginning factories near Okara. I was the only child. There were no proper schools at that time in Okara so I was home taught. My father had arranged a tutor Syed Tajjamal Hussain – Principal of Hyderabad Public School India – to teach me Maths, Science, and History.

When my family moved to Karachi in 1952, I joined Karachi Grammar School (KGS). Even though my English was relatively weak and I initially had problems, I managed to get two double promotions from Grade 3^rd to 5^th and 6^th to 8^th. I did my O Levels in 1958 and topped all over Pakistan. Incidentally, I had distinctions in all subjects except Physics and Chemistry. So, I decided to do Physics and Chemistry in my A Levels. I distinctly remember that I wasn’t an introvert or a book worm in my school or university days in Karachi. I used to play cricket and tennis and liked photography, debates, and dramatics and was quite a bit into literature as well. After finishing my Bsc (Honors) and then MSc in 1964, I initially worked as a Lecturer at Karachi University. The salary of the lecturer at that time was Rs. 375 per month. My father wanted me to join the family business but I wanted to make my own life. I convinced my father to let me go to UK. I won a Commonwealth Scholarship to go to Cambridge University.

When I arrived at Cambridge, it was a bit of a shock to me – as I am sure it is for every Pakistani student who ventures abroad – that while I had topped throughout the years, I had a lot of catch up to do.  John Harley Mason was my supervisor at Cambridge and advised me accordingly. At Cambridge I realised that I wasn’t very good at virtually all undergraduate areas but I vowed to work hard. After about a year or so, I had managed to get comfortable with the pace and level of studies at Cambridge. I received PhD in 1968 at the age of 26 and was elected Don at Kings College which I remained until 1972.

MS: What were the highlights of this initial career? How did you make the transition back from Cambridge to HEJ?

AUR: I had done my PhD in Organic Chemistry and was elected a fellow at Cambridge in 1969. One interesting thing happened during this phase of my career. I had come across a paper by Sir Robert Robinson (Nobel ’47), co-authored  with two other luminaries W. H. Perkin, and R.H.F. Manske on a set of compounds called Alkaloid Harnalines. Their work did not ring true to me so that I decided to reinvestigate it. During the course of my work I discovered that

their conclusions were wrong. Sir W. H. Perkin was a towering figure in Chemistry and two top British chemistry journals are named after him (Journal of Chemical Society Two (Perkin 1 and 2).  I published my findings in two papers published in the same journal (J.Chem.Soc. Perkin 1) in 1972.  That was a bit of a high for a young PhD. I was enjoying my work at Kings and – as a Don – had quite a bit of flexibility to do what I wanted to do. But I wanted to do something for Pakistan.

The transition began in 1970-71 when I spent a year at the Post Graduate Institute of Chemistry (now HEJ) with Dr. Salimuzzaman Siddiqui on a deputation from Cambridge University. Sir Alexander Todd – the Nobel Laureate and Head of Chemistry Department at Cambridge – was also kind enough to donate some equipment (e.g. micro-analyzers etc.) with which I had start building a lab at Karachi University. Dr. Siddiqui was an excellent classical chemist. I had been trained on a different paradigm and needed different equipment (such as spectrometers) to do my work. I returned back to Pakistan in Sept 1973.  I have always believed in making intensive efforts in achieving what you had set out to achieve. I wrote hundreds of letters to various departments, universities, aid agencies, and companies to provide us with equipment. We convinced a new British Company VG MicroMass to supply equipment to us virtually free of charge as we became their first customer in Asia. We only paid for installation and maintenance costs. This way Pakistan had its first mass spectrometer at a cost of £3,500 only.  Next was an NMR Spectrometer. After failing to get this from anywhere, I decided to approach a Bank. I walked into the Office of Mr. Jamil Nishtar, the Chairman of National Bank at that time and the son of Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar. I had letters from 8 different departments of Karachi University with me and asked for a loan to buy the equipment. We offered to pay off the loan over 10 years through a grant by Pakistan Science Foundation. Mr. Nishtar was quite surprised to see a scientist asking for a loan to buy equipment as this wasn’t very common at that time. It probably still isn’t. Anyways, he decided to approve the loan and we bought the NMR spectrometer. We were able to win some international contracts and were able to pay off the loan earlier than anticipated through a grant from the Pakistan Science Foundation. This marked the beginning of sophisticated research at HEJ Institute of Chemistry at Karachi University.

MS: HEJ Institute has established a name and a reputation for being one of the most prolific research institutes in Pakistan. I believe, at one time, HEJ was also responsible for producing a significant number of the entire country’s publications. What was it that made HEJ possible and enabled it to succeed as it did?

AUR: The period between 1974 and 1977 was an exciting period when we established a lot of norms for this institute. We introduced new methodologies into how chemistry was being done in Pakistan and focused our efforts in becoming a top centre in the world in the field of natural product chemistry, with particular emphasis on structural chemistry and biological activities. Synthetic chemistry requires the use of a lot of new chemicals and materials which were not easily accessible in the country. If you had to wait for 6 months to get a chemical that you needed to carry out an experiment, it would be quite a useless exercise. We established ourselves into a niche of Structural Chemistry thereby leveraging our natural endowments of medicinal plants that were amply available in this part of the world. Some of the earlier researchers such as Dr. Bina Siddiqui, Dr. Viqaruddin, and myself come from that tradition and this has continued to this day at the Institute. In doing so, we became leaders in the field of Natural Products Chemistry as it has come to be defined now.

Also from an institutional standpoint, this new institute of Chemistry was a world apart from other institutions in Pakistan. We made a number of important changes that explain the productivity and prolificacy of HEJ’s scientists.

First, we established, for the first time in Pakistan, what could be described as a performance based tenure system at HEJ. So, every researcher who came to HEJ initially came on a contract appointment until he was able to prove his or her performance through publication and grantsmanship. Only gradually did they progress from Research Fellows and Senior Research Fellows to Assistant Professors.

Second, we realized the importance of technical infrastructure and equipment for the functioning of the institute. HEJ hired engineers and technicians and sent them abroad for training on specialist equipment. These engineers and technicians a very important part of the institute and we paid them well and took good care of them. In doing so, we eliminated one of the problems often encountered in Pakistan whereby laboratory equipment is often lying around in dysfunctional state and is unfit for use.

Third, we introduced the notion of dedicated research funding in Pakistan. At that time and still sometimes Pakistani Research Institutes take on too many researchers and give them little in the form of dedicated R&D funding. Often salaries account for 90% of the institutes’ budgets leaving little for equipment and chemicals. At HEJ, we made sure that our staff salaries were no more than 35% of our overall budget.  We made sure that this remained so and even trimmed staff when we went off balance. We believed in having fewer more productive and empowered staff than a lot of people who were not empowered enough to deliver. This left us with money to support research. We also paid fellowships to PhD students to attract quality students. Each and every one of our PhD students, for instance, is on a paid PhD fellowship.

Fourth, we established a system of research support that enabled researchers to get used to the world of competitive research grants. In addition to the international grants that we won – and that were part of researchers’ performance review and promotions – we also gave internal grants. Unlike other institutions, these were awarded in inverse proportion of the researchers’ seniority. So, a professor would get the least amount of money per student enrolled from internal research grants and a junior researcher will be given the highest preference. This would help establish the young scientist in his or her new career and make them into prolific researchers later on.

Finally, we established mechanisms to undertake multidisciplinary research. For example we were the first institute of chemistry in the country to have an animal house with over 100 different biological screens available for analysis to find active ingredients.

In late 1970s, Mr. Latif Ebrahim Jamal agreed to fund the construction of the new building so we were able to expand our operations. This current building in which we’re housed today was made from this philanthropic contribution. In due course, HEJ was able to establish a steady stream of research grants. For example, we won a DM 4.8 million grant from Germany, a £1 million grant from UK’s ODA, and an $8m grant from Office of Naval Research of the US to carry out marine research.

MS: How would you rate the performance of HEJ Research Institute of Chemistry at the global level? How significant, in global scientific terms, is the work done at HEJ?

AUR: HEJ is pretty much a premier institution in the field of natural products chemistry. We are certainly the most advanced and respected institutions in the developing world in this field and one of the more advanced ones in the world. Over the years, our work has been instrumental in understanding and documenting the structures and properties of interesting bioactive compounds occurring in the natural environment and has been recognized world over. Two of HEJ’s researchers, Dr. Salimuzzaman Siddiqi and myself have been elected as Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS) which is one of the highest honors awarded to a scientist for a lifetime of achievement.

MS: So, let’s talk about the big picture. From what I understand, HEJ has, over the years, done a lot of work understanding the structure and properties of naturally occurring compounds. I understood Darwin to have done a similar task when he embarked upon his voyage on the Beagle. Darwin proposed the theory of evolution as a result of his observations. Is there a grand unification theory of sorts that could be derived from HEJ’s work? Does all of this hard work come together into something brilliant – something remarkable? Is there a Nobel Prize around the corner somewhere?

AUR: The grand unification theory – if there is one – in HEJ’s work over the years is to establish, from a scientific standpoint, the importance of “Hikmat” which is our traditional medicine and its potential advantages in many cases over the more modern medicine of the west. Modern medicines normally rely on the reactions of a single “active” ingredient in medicine to cure an illness. In Hikmat, on the other hand, multiple approaches and multiple compounds create multiple interactions and it is their combined effect that have novel synergistic ways to produce cures by new and hitherto unknown mechanisms. There is no reason why we should not be able to use complex mixtures in medicine as long as the mixture is safe and effective, as established by proper scientific double blind clinical trials. In herbal tea, for example, there is not one but tens or hundreds of different compounds whose combined effect is what we’re interested in. As you may be able to guess, it is very hard to provide scientific proof of the mechanisms of action of a potion of multiple compounds and even if we’re able to do so, the requirements of Food and Drug Administration and other approval agencies  make it almost impossible to get such a drug through to the market. If we’re successful – and it’s unlikely that we would be, for we’re moving against the tide vis-à-vis the entire basis of today’s pharmaceutical industry – it would be revolutionary change in how medicine is practiced in the future.

With regards to the Nobel Prize, I believe that Nobel Prizes are given largely for single accidental discoveries and may or may not actually relate with the impact of a lifetime’s of a person’s work. Luck has a lot to do with one’s winning of a Nobel Prize. You have to be at the right place at the right time and have to be playing the game at a certain level. Without taking away anything from the prestige of the Nobel Prize, I believe that the Fellowship of the Royal Society is an equally valuable acknowledgement of one’s lifetime of contribution. I have also won the UNESCO Science Prize and was one of the first persons from the developing world to win that Prize.

MS: I was going to come to the UNESCO Science Prize. What work led to that?

AUR: The UNESCO Science Prize I won was for a number of different things although the citation said that it was in recognition of overall contribution to science. In particular, it also mentioned my work in the synthesis of anti-cancer drugs. I had worked on developing synthetic approaches to some alkaloids that had been useful in the delivery of drugs for leukaemia. They are derived from the leaves of a plant “periwinkle” (locally known as “Sad’a Bahar”, botanically it is Catharanthus Roseus) – naturally occurring plant of some significance in the subcontinent.

MS: Let’s shift gears to your work as a policy-maker, first at as Minister of Science and Technology in General Musharraf’s Government (from 1999-2001) and then as Chairman of Higher Education Commission (from 2002-2008). Tell us how that your alliance with Musharraf came about and how did you manage to build such a close partnership?

AUR: I found Musharraf to be an eager listener of good ideas that I was able to bring to him. He made fast decisions and that was very out of character with the rest of the bureaucratic system in Pakistan. I was also able to convince him to spend a lot of money on science and education. In a way Musharraf was the singular influence on his cabinet when it came to implementing our science and higher education reform agenda. Even his technocrat Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, did not really understand and appreciate the value of what we were doing and was often on the wrong side of the debate. I believe that we have to somehow build support for science and education within our society. It is very hard to do so, though. When the more educated of your classes don’t value investments in science and education, what do you expect from the rest of the society and our feudals and politicians whose vested interest often is to not let their people get educated. This is an uphill task and the politicisation and policy reversals don’t really help the cause.

MS: With regards to HEC’s performance, which has been a subject of much debate and controversy in the Pakistani media, you have often quoted numbers – spectacular numbers in hundreds and thousands in percentage terms – to support your reform efforts. You’ve also had critics who have vehemently disagreed with your version of the story. Obviously a lot has been said about HEC and we don’t want to go into the details of everything but what was HEC really able to achieve and not achieve?

AUR: The cornerstone of HEC’s efforts – and a major chunk of its funding – has gone into training of PhDs as well as other staff to supplement universities’ human resource capacity. Very early on in the process, we realised that the fate of the reform of Pakistan’s university sector would rest on the availability of faculty and that received lions’ share of our attention. We created a number of PhD scholarships and fellowships that were available to Pakistanis – in some cases public sector faculty – through merit based competition. You can have differing opinions about certain elements of how we went about doing our work but you cannot have a quarrel with the basic premise and focus of our investments. In the ultimate analysis it is not what I, my supporters or critics say that matters but what eminent external peers conclude after neutral review and evaluation [for example, here]

MS: HEC’s critics have talked about compromising quality over quantity. The Domestic PhD fellowships programme was particularly singled out by a Nature article published in September 2009 as particularly troubling. The qualification criterion (entry or exit) was not decided well into the launch of the programme and by that time it was probably too late to make corrections. How do you respond to these criticisms?

AUR: I think HEC’s critics have been particular unfair to us. Let me explain to you why. Universities are completely  autonomous institutions responsible for their own governing bodies and faculty senates to set policies. Universities have, for long, made policy decisions on their own without much interference of the either Ministries of Education or University Grants Commission. By law, HEC cannot force a university to do something or implement an order. We can only “encourage” and inspire them to adopt certain practices.

This would be clear to you if you take a detailed look at the HEC ordinance. We had no power to force any university to do anything. We could only “encourage” and “advise”. Yes we had the power to stop funding to a particular university but that in itself is not a “stick” that can be credibly used. Universities fall under the Provincial or Federal Governments and it is politically impossible for HEC to stop funding to a particular university.

Throughout my stint as Chairman HEC, we used our ability to stop funding to a university only once and that too against Punjab University when the case of plagiarism against certain members of their faculty came up. Plagiarism is a major crime in academia and we thought that we had to come down quite hard to stamp it from existence and discourage future practice in Pakistan. However, even in that extreme case, we had no power to hold inquiry against the offending faculty members. It was the university itself that had held the inquiry and found the faculty members as having carried out the offense.

The University Inquiry had recommended the dismissal of these faculty members but the administration was dragging their feet on it because of political pressures. It was in those circumstances that we came down insisting that the university carry out the punishments its own Inquiry Committee had awarded to the offending members of the faculty. Even in these circumstances we did not stop all funding to the university. The non-development expenditure comprising salaries of staff and other maintenance expenses continued. We only suspended development expenditure to the university until they carried out the recommendations of their own inquiry committee. By doing so, we demonstrated our strong commitment to quality and discouraged future offense.

Similarly, with the entry requirements for the domestic PhD programme. We did not have any power to force universities to adopt a certain standard. All we did, initially, was to announce a programme that made money available to universities that they could tap into to pay stipends for PhD students. The universities had the singular responsibility to ensure quality of intake. The professors themselves are individually responsible for ensuring that they graduate PhD students of a certain level. However, only after the universities failed to self-regulate and the faculty began abusing the system did we that the next step to clearly state the entry requirements to the PhD programme.

Again, in deciding that requirement (40 percentile on local standardised test or subject GRE) we had to work with Vice Chancellors. This was a minimum (since many of our universities, particularly those in Balochistan and other remote areas are too weak) and the institutions were encouraged to start with a higher requirement— in my centre the minimum is 60 percentile. There are still several universities who do not subscribe to our requirements and the best we can do is to not make HEC funded fellowships available to them. I believe our critics themselves had the first responsibility to ensure that quality went into their universities’ programmes by acting through university senate and other representative bodies. It is they, not HEC, who have actually failed to live up to the standards that academia demands of all of us and it is unfair of them to blame HEC for their own failings.

MS: I agree but don’t you believe HEC had a responsibility too. I mean launching major programmes and policy interventions assume some responsibility of thinking through the unintended consequences of these policies. Anybody who was launching a Domestic PhD programme that paid a lot of money to faculty supervisors could have predicted that it would create perverse incentives for them. This is very interesting, though, and quite contrary to the impression that exists out there in the media and the intellectual elite of this country of the “all-powerful” HEC forcing reforms down the throat of Universities. What you’re saying is very different. Why do you believe such a gap exists between the perception of HEC’s power and the reality of its influence?

AUR: I think this is a strong misperception and we’re partly responsible for not being able to communicate the delicate dance that we had to do to bring reform to our universities.  But I think if our critics could just read the Act that established HEC, it would be amply clear that we had much less power and legal authority than most of critics give us the credit for. The only power that we had was to stop financing universities or the worst of all delist them. These were very blunt instruments and we had to do be very careful using it. Universities, on the other hand, had much more power and they could do whatever they liked if they were willing to walk away from public funding and we couldn’t do anything about that other than de-recognise their degrees. We used that power in a few instances when universities failed to get their act together and meet quality and capability standards. We couldn’t create quality overnight. All we could do would be to start a process and gradually nudge the universities towards adopting quality as a virtue. Creating quality requires quality faculty and quality faculty does not grow on trees. It is a long process with a gestation period. You could sow the seeds today and the impact will begin to happen in 5-7 years. That’s what we tried to do.

MS: So, hand on heart, are you satisfied that we are training quality scientific manpower and faculty? And that, in the selection and training – particularly in the domestic PhD Programme – these future faculty are being equipped with holistic enough set of skills (e.g. social sciences, art, literature) to be able to solve the problems that challenge us as a society?

AUR: We could not have done better, since we were starting from a very weak base.  We provide a number of important elements in the research support infrastructure needed for quality scholarship. We made several significant changes in the educational experience to ensure that our students get a more well-rounded learning experience. For instance, the 4-year bachelors degree is designed to introduce a liberal arts education at the undergraduate level. We would like philosophy, humanities, literature, and the arts to be taught to scientists and non-scientists alike. Our education system is currently too narrowly focused and we need a more broad-based curriculum. Our system also has too many inflexibilities in that it doesn’t allow pupil to switch between specialisation streams. Our career structures are too rigid and not-so-well-paying to attract the best and the brightest to science. I believe that while the real motivation for research must be intrinsic (i.e. internal) career prospects play a major role in a society like ours. All these need to happen simultaneously for quality to emerge. We had some control over some of these factors but little control over others. We tried to do the best that we could.

MS: So, given that you didn’t have too much legal authority and control over only a few aspects of the higher education system and that you had to move by developing consensus within the vice chancellors of the universities you were dealing with, tell me some things that you couldn’t implement but would have liked to because of this opposition?

AUR: There weren’t many things that were not able to do. The only significant programme that could not be carried out was the establishment of foreign universities in Pakistan in collaboration with Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Austria, China and Korea. Classes were to start in October 2008 but the programme was frozen by the new government in May 2008 and lies dormant. We did have to take the feedback from our constituents – the universities – into account and be flexible about how to implement our agenda. We phased some of our reforms. For example, when it came to the recognition of local journals, we gradually phased in tougher standards. Had we done that immediately, the whole system of faculty promotion would have collapsed. Similarly, on the university rankings, we wanted to get university departments peer reviewed and ranked. That was quite controversial so we initially moved away from the idea but we ultimately did it.

I believe the perception of the all powerful HEC was because of my own personality. I like to get things done when I decide upon them and do so with great intensity and passion. I had established – during the days of General Musharraf – the ultimate forum to take policy decisions where other government departments dragged their feet by our comparison. We had set up a Chancellors’ Committee at the National Level with the President, the Prime Minister, Governors and Chief Ministers of Provinces, Minister of Planning and Finance and myself as its members. This Chancellors’ Committee met 2-3 times a year, and made important policy decisions whose implementation was overseen by HEC. HEC was so efficient with this decision-making process that we ended up creating more development projects than all of the other government departments combined. In a country where the whole of bureaucracy is designed not to work, HEC became a shining star of action and that might have given the impression.

MS: You moved very fast, perhaps too fast in your reforms and perhaps that also created the impression. Do you believe a slower, more deliberate and well-thought through approach that would avoided some of the lapses in implementation would have made more friends or at least avoided unnecessary opposition?

AUR: I don’t believe anything that we did was wrong. I believed that we had a unique window of opportunity – a limited amount of time – to create such a deep impact that the reforms would become irreversible. If we had moved slower, we would not have achieved that kind of impact. In the Pakistani system there is huge amount of deadwood so smaller interventions won’t make much difference. You have to shake the boat and get it going. Once the boat is running, smaller interventions will be fine. We provided that jolt to the system.  Today, I believe that HEC’s reforms have become irreversible. Even the current government wanted to, it cannot undo what we have done.

[Editor’s Note: This interview happened before the current events surrounding devolution of HEC. Atta has since come out strongly in support of HEC and has laid out his case in a number of places, including here]

MS: Let’s talk about COMSTECH – Your latest job after resigning from the Chairmanship of the Higher Education Commission. Tell us about the challenges and possibilities of that position?

AUR: Yes. COMSTECH was a very small institutions when I took over in 1996. Then it had a budget of $50K per annum which has since grown to about $2 million per annum. We have worked a number of partners – TWAS, IFS, IDB etc. – to get our projects funded and launched a whole range of scientists’ support and grant programmes. But getting member countries to fund COMSTECH has been a challenge. I have been working on the Science, Technology, and Innovation Organisation (STIO) for about 10-12 years now and finally – with the intervention of Dr. Ihsanoglu – it has reached fruition. It is a major challenge to move anything through the OIC system since decisions require approval of all member states. Even if a single country disagrees with a decision, it will not happen. This severely limits OIC’s ability to implement things. A few years ago, there was a proposal to set up a Pan Islamic R&D Fund in which all OIC member states would contribute according to a percentage (0.1%) of their GDP and these funds would be centrally administered and available to all member states. We worked very hard to get the fund’s idea through various stages of the OIC process. However, the disagreement of two countries – Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – at the Conference of Foreign Ministers (CFM) which meets just before the Summit to discuss proposals for the Summit’s approval killed the idea.

MS: So, how do you get around that problem?

AUR: STIO is designed to get around that issue of absolute consensus. We were able to get STIO approved because this calls upon member states to contribute “money for their own development”. Membership in STIO is optional but contributions – once you’re a member – are mandatory unlike COMSTECH where it is the other way round. STIO, we hope, will provide OIC member countries with a platform, to work together on problems of utmost importance such as, science, innovation, and education. So far only 4 member countries have made financial commitments totalling about $20 million – again 90% of this money will remain within the country that makes the pledge and will be spent on projects identified by it. This, we hope, will pave the way for other countries to join as well.

MS: Why is Intra-OIC Collaboration so difficult to achieve?

AUR: It has been a challenge. OIC member countries don’t see themselves as natural partners. There is an affinity between them but only in theory, yes, but in practice, no. There is a tendency to not contribute or invest outside their countries. Of all these years of COMSTECH, for instance, Egypt which is one of the major scientific players in the Islamic World, has never contributed a single penny towards its programmes but has always benefitted tremendously from them. We don’t block fellowships just because a country does not contribute. So, Egyptians do get COMSTECH fellowships in quite big numbers. This is something we need to work on and change. We need a programme like European Union (Framework Programmes) whereby all Muslim countries contribute and share in the collective resources. That’s still a goal that is quite far away.

MS: So, with the creation of STIO, where does COMSTECH go from here? We have written about this in localhost/muslim. COMSTECH, as originally conceived, was supposed to be a policy body whose job was it to coordinate science and technology policy and create support for science at the highest levels within OIC member countries. Over time, it has taken on the implementation mandate and has almost become a grants-making body. Now that STIO is there to support that role, does COMSTECH revert back to its role as a Science Policy Think Tank for its constituents – the Science Ministers?

AUR: Yes, I think you’re right. The future of COMSTECH is firmly in the realm of policy and with STIO it can revert back to its original purpose. However, we still have to think strategically about how to create support for science in the OIC member countries. The problem, as I have said before, is not at the level of Science Ministers but the Heads of States and Ministers of Finance who do not realize that we live in a knowledge driven world and need to transform our respective countries to knowledge economies. This is important because of the diminishing importance of natural resources as compared to science, technology and innovation. We need a champion – at the level of Heads of States – who could spend time and political capital building that support. General Musharraf was trying to be that champion but he couldn’t succeed. This is, however, something important that must try again.

MS: My friend Ehsan Masood tells me that Atta isn’t done yet. He will be back to carry forward his reforms. Do you plan to return back someday?

AUR: I hope I don’t have to. I believe I have built sustainability and momentum of the reforms in the manner that these could progress without my presence. I do not intend to participate in politics. That was one reason I decided to give up the position of Minister of Science and Technology after new government was elected under Musharraf and take on the unelected position of Chairman of Higher Education Commission. I also thought that Higher Education is where the foundation for science gets built so this deserved more attention. I am a scientist and would like to continue working within my realm.

MS: Thank you, Dr. Atta ur Rahman, for being so generous with your time. We hope we have managed to capture a lot of mystery and enigma as well as passion behind what has been a very eventful decade of your life. We hope our readers will benefit from learning first hand some of your thoughts and ideas.

Dr. Athar Osama is a London based science and innovation policy consultant and the Director of Middle East and Asia for an international technology policy consulting firm. He is also a Visiting Fellow at Boston University’s Pardee Centre for Study of Longer Range Future and the founder of localhost/muslim.

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Disclaimer: The interviewer does not vouch for the veracity of statements made in this interview. The interviewer’s job is to convey, as faithfully as possible, the views and ideas of the interviewee.

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