Karachi (PPI) - Islamia College Karachi will not be handed over to an NGO and remain under the government control, said Sindh Senior Minister for Literacy, Education and Criminal Prosecution Pir Mazharul Haq. This he said while speaking at an inaugural ceremony of Dukhtar-e-Mashrique Government Girls Degree College, Jamshed Town here on Saturday. Sindh government will not allow to put future of over 20000 students at stake by privatizing government colleges in Karachi, he added. "I have held a meeting with Sindh Governor Dr Ishratul Ebad Khan in this regard and apprised him about the measures taken by Sindh government to resolve the issue. Governor Sindh also agreed on our stance in this regard," the minister said. Sindh colleges will be equipped with scientific equipment and modern labs while lack of educational staff will also be resolved, he said. The minister said Sindh government is paying special attention towards improvement of educational institutions in the province, he added. Meanwhile, the minister inaugurated a book fair at Liaquat National Library organised by National Education Foundation. Mazhar presents compensation cheques Sindh Education Minister Pir Mazharul Huq and Chairperson KPT, Nasreen Haque, Saturday presented cheques for Rs 50,000 each to fathers of four children who died in a tragic incident at F.G School Manora. The cheques were presented to bereaved fathers at a ceremony held at KPT head Office. Two fathers of three deceased children are regular KPTT staff workers of KPT. Taimur Khan (7), a student of class I was son of Zafar Ali, ASI Watch & Ward Department KPT; Arbab Khan and Fardeen Khan, aged 10 and 6 years respectively were studying in Class-VI and Class-I, were sons of Muhammad Shoaib, a carpenter presently working in Chief Engineering Department KPT. The fourth child was Adnan son of Nisar. Education Minister Pir Mazhar-ul-Haque and Chairperson KPT Mrs. Nasreen Haque condoled with the families of deceased children and offered all possible assistance to them. Fateha was also offered for the departed souls. HEC's Advanced Network for Researchers Fully Operational The advanced Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN), launched by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) that is connected to global Research and Education Networks (RENs) including the Internet2 of USA, Asia-Pacific Advanced Network of continents of Asia and Australia, and GEANT2 network of National RENs of European countries, is fully operational for use by researchers, academicians and students who may initiate activities and projects with international collaborations. This link is a result of joint efforts of the HEC and the National Science Foundation of USA who equally co-funded a dedicated link from PERN to Internet2. PERN now has a total R&E link capacity of 155 Mbps and it is now leading in South Asia being three times bigger than the linking capacity of India's Education & Research Network (ERNet) which is connected to global R&E network over a 45 Mbps link. Through this connectivity, academicians and researchers would be directly connected to other peer RENs, resulting in lesser delays and low latency with add on features of security and high performance for the specialized and time sensitive activities, like simulations on distributed resources, telemedicine and video conferencing, remote instrumentations, etc. Moreover, universities and institutes now have access to the large contents and research resources available with the constituent academic and research institutions in RENs in advanced countries. These include free online educational multimedia-on-demand, online library resources, access to supercomputing and grid nodes, collaborative tools, digital heritage, test bed for the future internet design, advanced network services' test bed for IPv6, multicast implementation, layer 2 virtual private networks (VPNs) etc. The purpose of this network connection is to support Pakistan's science and technology collaborations with technologically advanced countries. The network connections will greatly assist the scientific collaborations being defined between the developed countries and Pakistan by allowing more direct, high-speed access and communication among S&T investigators and worldwide S&T resources. As an example this allows High-speed access to the Bio-Mirror and other genomics based archive data hosted by Indiana University which is critical for genome research will be facilitated by this high-performance connection. Similarly, this connection will allow more rapid access to data originating from the NSF funded Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) project to assist the efforts of the Earth Sciences and Seismology WG. The project of PERN was initiated in 2002 as an Educational Intranet. Since then the Network has evolved significantly and provides valuable services like high speed internet, audio/video conferencing, access to digital library resources including journals, books and research thesis in digitalized format.