Pakistan's University Professors: No Raise in Five Years, No Pension, No Answer
The researchers who produce over 75 percent of Pakistan's academic output are earning the same salary they earned in 2021. Their BPS colleagues received 71 percent more in the same period.
In the HEC’s standard Deed of Agreement for postdoctoral fellowship recipients, Clause 26 requires the scholar to pledge they will not protest HEC policies. Clause 5 bars them from seeking foreign citizenship. Clause 19 stipulates that their passport may be forfeited if the HEC deems them non-compliant. Clause 29 requires them to surrender 25 percent of their earnings as a financial penalty for any breach the HEC judges to have occurred. These four clauses sit inside a 34-clause document that governs the conditions under which a Pakistani scholar, trained at public expense, is permitted to remain in their own country and do the work the state trained them to do.
The people who signed this document are the people whose salaries have been frozen since 2021.
When the Higher Education Commission was created in September 2002 by presidential ordinance, the declared purpose was national transformation. Pakistan would build a knowledge economy. The language came from the OECD’s 1996 framework paper and the World Bank’s 1998 Knowledge for Development report. The task force that recommended the HEC’s creation was co-chaired by Syed Babar Ali and Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, was sponsored by the World Bank, and conducted its deliberations in the months after September 11, 2001, when the United States had reasons beyond academic interest in Pakistani institutional stability. The HEC was constituted in that window.
The Tenure Track System followed in 2003. It borrowed from American research universities: a six-year probationary evaluation period for assistant professors, mandatory international peer review, contract-based employment without the civil service protections of the Basic Pay Scale system. In exchange, TTS faculty would earn double the salary of BPS-equivalent ranks. The Finance Ministry resisted from the beginning. Atta-ur-Rahman lobbied it personally, arguing that the system required publication in international journals, subjected faculty to external evaluation, and offered no job security. The Ministry agreed. The premium was codified. Universities would pay the BPS-equivalent portion and the HEC would top up the difference.
To populate the system, HEC launched overseas scholarship programs. Scholars were sent abroad for PhD training at a cost, by Atta-ur-Rahman’s own accounting, of PKR 8 to 10 million per student in European programs and PKR 20 million in American ones. Between 2003 and 2008, scholars were offered university positions in Pakistan before completing their degrees abroad. Jobs were guaranteed on return. Research grants of up to $100,000 were available in the final year of study. A digital library providing access to 65,000 books and 25,000 international journals was promised. The return rate for that cohort was 97.5 percent.
Then the results arrived. In 2002, Pakistan produced 53 research publications per ten million population in internationally recognized impact-factor journals. India produced 186 per ten million, four times Pakistan’s output. By 2017, Pakistan had closed that gap and inverted it. By 2018, Pakistani universities produced 916 research publications per capita against 708 from India. In roughly fifteen years, Pakistan went from 400 percent behind India in per capita research output to 30 percent ahead. A 2017 study in Scientometrics found Pakistan’s research output growth rate exceeded that of the United States, China, and India. TTS faculty, approximately 28 percent of total permanent university staff, were, by internal HEC performance data, producing more than 75 percent of that output.
In 2021, the HEC froze their salaries.
The freeze did not arrive as a decision. It arrived as inertia. The 2021 revision was the third salary adjustment in two decades. After it was made, bringing the assistant professor minimum to Rs175,500 per month, nothing further happened. Consumer prices rose 38 percent year-on-year by May 2023. The rupee fell. Fuel, food, and housing costs rose and stayed. The tax burden on salaried earners was restructured through successive finance acts, placing TTS faculty in progressively punishing income-tax slabs. By the figures submitted to the Senate Standing Committee on Finance, the tax burden on TTS faculty increased by 81 percent over the five-year freeze. The state also removed the tax rebate for teachers and researchers that had previously provided some offset. Had annual revisions been applied, an assistant professor would today earn Rs328,000. The salary remained Rs175,500.
Faculty hired under the regular BPS system received a cumulative 71 percent increase over the same period. A senior BPS professor at a federal university now earns upwards of PKR 800,000 to one million per month, inclusive of pension, gratuity, medical allowances, leave encashment, and death benefits. TTS faculty receive none of that. No pension. No health insurance. In many universities, no subsidized housing, which BPS colleagues draw as a matter of right. They entered a system that asked them to surrender civil service protections in exchange for competitive compensation. The compensation stopped competing. The protections are not recoverable.
The HEC spent those same years rewriting the conditions under which TTS faculty could be promoted. The Higher Education Journal Recognition System, revised in 2019 and implemented from July 2020, sorted journals into three categories: W for the highest-ranked Scopus and Web of Science publications, X for internationally indexed journals, Y for nationally recognized ones. Faculty in the sciences were required to publish in W-category journals to qualify for promotion. The gap between that requirement and the limited capacity of Pakistani researchers to place work in genuinely selective international venues created an industry. Predatory open-access journals operating on pay-to-publish models proliferated precisely in that space. One director at the University of Karachi spent more than Rs83 lacs on article processing charges in a single year, as reported by The News. University administrations, when confronted with such spending, noted that the numbers were lower than in other countries. The system designed to measure research quality had produced a mechanism for purchasing the appearance of it, and the purchase price was drawn from frozen salaries.
For social scientists, the trap was built more precisely. In 2025, not a single Pakistani journal in the social sciences carried recognition in HEC’s X or W categories. A sociologist studying land tenure in interior Sindh, a political scientist analyzing administrative structures in Balochistan, an economist researching the informal labor market in Karachi: none of them could publish that work in a Pakistani journal and have it count toward promotion. They were required to place their work in international Western venues, which demand that Pakistan-specific research be framed within a global theoretical literature, legible to editorial boards whose institutional interests do not run through Hyderabad or Peshawar. You could study this country or you could advance your career. The HEC encoded that choice in policy.
Promotion, when it arrived at all, arrived without salary adjustment. The HEC had mandated that all TTS promotion and appointment cases receive what it called “original endorsement” from the commission itself, stripping the statutory authority that every university act had always vested in the institution’s own senate and selection board. This created a bottleneck in Islamabad with no processing deadline. At institutions including COMSATS and several newer public universities, promotion cases sat for six to eight years without formal rejection or approval, neither advanced nor refused, not moved. The TTS statutes specified defined timelines for promotion at each rank. HEC’s processing machinery operated on no corresponding schedule. When a case exceeded the probationary period because it had spent years in HEC’s own queue, the commission applied the time-bar rule, rendering the faculty member ineligible on grounds of delay that had originated with HEC itself. A professor who received a promotion in 2023 after six years of a pending case received the new title and the same monthly salary, because promotion and compensation revision were classified as separate administrative events requiring separate ministry decisions, and the ministry had not made the compensation decision since 2021.
Across those years, the state did not ignore the problem. It performed attention to it.
A 2021 proposal, approved by the former Prime Minister, sought to restore a mandatory 35 percent salary differential in favor of TTS faculty and introduce a 100 percent performance-based allowance for top researchers. The Finance Division declined to validate it, ruling that only the federal cabinet could authorize recurring financial obligations. The cabinet was not convened for this purpose. In 2020, the HEC had already amended the TTS statutes to index TTS salaries to the comparable BPS scale plus a 35 percent premium, with automatic future adjustments. The Finance Ministry did not implement the amendment. In 2023, a special task force was constituted under Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal. It met eight times. In its eighth meeting it approved recommendations to benchmark TTS salaries against the PIDE BPS framework with a 35 percent premium. The Finance Ministry did not implement the recommendations. In March 2025, the Islamabad High Court ordered the HEC to disburse Rs1.5 billion to universities within one week and file a compliance report. The HEC disbursed the funds. APTTA welcomed the order and simultaneously raised concerns that the Finance Division had structured the disbursement to exclude certain allowances, reducing its real impact. In April 2026, the Finance Ministry drafted a cabinet summary listing multiple options for addressing the TTS pay structure, including reinstating the 35 percent differential, introducing performance tiers, or redesigning allowances. The cabinet had not yet decided.
On May 6 of this year, Minister of State for Finance Bilal Kayani convened a meeting with APTTA representatives. No final solution was agreed. The Finance Division indicated support for a one-time increase but structured to exclude allowances in a way that would reduce its real-terms effect. An additional secretary of finance told the Senate Standing Committee on Finance, during the same period, that the proposed salary revision was not a legal obligation.
That sentence is the piece of institutional record that makes the rest of it legible. Not inertia. A position.
The HEC, writing to the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance in its budget proposal for FY 2026-27, requested an increase in recurring university funding from Rs65 billion to Rs100 billion. Within that request, it specifically earmarked Rs5 billion to cover anticipated TTS salary increases per Islamabad High Court directions. The government communicated back an Indicative Budgetary Ceiling of Rs65 billion, unchanged since fiscal year 2017-18, nine years during which university enrolments expanded, inflation compounded, and the operational costs of running a university roughly tripled. As of this week, reports indicate the government is planning no salary increases at all in the Budget 2026-27, expected in the first week of June, instead redirecting fiscal space toward income tax cuts. Yesterday, the Islamabad chapter of the Federation of All Pakistan Universities Academic Staff Associations issued a fresh demand for immediate TTS salary implementation, warning that continued delay was accelerating the brain drain and would compromise Pakistan’s capacity to maintain international academic standards. It is the most recent statement in a sequence that has been producing statements, demands, committee meetings, court orders, task force sessions, and supplementary grants for five years without a salary revision.
The scale of what the state spent to produce these faculty members does not appear in any Finance Ministry brief. The HEC overseas PhD scholarships cost between Rs8 million and Rs20 million per scholar depending on the country. The HEC sent 3,001 scholars abroad for PhD studies in the decade before 2024. At the lower end of the per-scholar cost in European programs, the investment in that cohort approaches Rs24 billion in public funds. The scholars were trained. Most returned, at least in the earlier period, when the state honored what it promised: guaranteed jobs on arrival, startup research grants, library access, competitive compensation. The 97.5 percent return rate of the 2003-2008 cohort was not produced by loyalty to Pakistan in the abstract. It was produced by a state that offered something specific and delivered it.
The 304 scholars who did not return from the Faculty Development Program, whom the Auditor General of Pakistan flagged as having caused a loss to the national exchequer of Rs1.12 billion, had petitions filed against them through the National Accountability Bureau. The state tracked them across international borders and pursued recovery.
The 4,000 who stayed are in the Islamabad High Court asking for a salary increase, and an additional secretary of finance has told Parliament it is not a legal obligation.
The Deed of Agreement, with its 34 clauses, its passport forfeiture provision, its ban on protest, was not written carelessly. Clause 26 does not exist because someone in the HEC bureaucracy was unimaginative about what future scholars might do. It exists because someone understood, at the moment of drafting, that the conditions being encoded into the system would eventually produce grievance, and that the grievance should be pre-empted by contract rather than prevented by policy. The people who drafted Clause 26 knew.
The salary was frozen. The task forces met. The court issued orders. The Finance Ministry drafted summaries with multiple options and scheduled cabinet reviews that produced no decisions. The budget cycle turns again in June, and the corridor conversation in Islamabad is that salaries will not be revised.
The scholars came back at 97.5 percent when the state kept its word. The state knows what that number was, and what produced it, and what has replaced it.