While the Prime Ministers decision ordering that all government servants degrees be verified is apparently unexceptionable, it probably would not have been taken if parliamentarians degrees were not being verified, and a sizeable number discovered to have been fake at the time of their submission before the 2008 election. While the degree condition has been removed by the 19th Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled that those found to have submitted fake degrees then were to be unseated. While Mr Gilani is cavalier enough about parliamentarians degrees to have campaigned for Jamshed Dasti, who had been given the PPP ticket for the by-election caused by his resignation because he was about to be found to have submitted a fake degree, he has shown his concern about civil servants now. While the recruiting authorities are supposed to have verified the degrees of candidates for official jobs, and thus government servants are supposed to have had their qualifications verified at the time of recruitment, the exercise will only be useful if it ends not just with the dismissal of all offending employees, but also with the erring recruiting authorities being asked why they allowed this lapse to occur. The deadline given for this process is April 4, which cannot be met, not if the pace of verifying parliamentarians degrees is anything to go by, especially when it considered that just over 1000 parliamentarians degrees have only now been checked, and there are about 350,000 federal government employees. Even if the process of checking is not as rigorous, even a semblance of checking will take a very long time. There is also the possibility that officials with fake degrees may themselves have been involved with recruitment, a possibility that does not arise in the case of parliamentarians. It is true, perhaps, that someone obtaining government service on the basis of fake degrees is obtaining a greater benefit than someone obtaining the right of contesting an election. Mr Gilanis order smacks of yet another move to protect those now in danger of losing their seats. He should not be so supportive of those who entered the Assemblies after having practised a deception upon their voters. While government servants should also have their degrees verified at the time of recruitment, it must also be ensured that action is taken against the parliamentarians who have tried to deceive in so blatant a fashion, because the original graduation condition was meant by a military regime to exclude from the assemblies some trenchant critics.