ISLAMABAD - As part of the ongoing drive against fake degrees, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) has sent educational degrees of 31 more of its employees for cross-verification to the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Islamabad.

The degrees of the employees were already verified by the Commission as the employees had submitted it on their own. But the Authority has now decided to re-verify them all. The officials include Fozia Begum, Muhammad Ayaz Khan, Syed Hamid Ali Shah, Khudeja-Tul-Kubra, Omer Sagheer, Muhammad Farooq Khan, Muhammad Tauqeer Nawaz, Sadia Ismail, Fazal Majeed, Uzma Ali, Atia Bano, Anwar Ul Haq, Manzoor Hussain Shah, Muhammad Sharif, Muhammad Muazzam, Muhammad Ammar Idrees, Zafar Iqbal, Inam ul Karim Rizwan, Shahid Pervez, Muhammad Asghar, Waqas Farid, Allah Ditta, Khurram Mumtaz, Sheeraz Sami Khan, Shaheen Afzal, Muhammad Waseem Sabir, Muhammad Ansar, Akhtar Rasool, Sajid Mahmood, Wahid Abbas and Beenish Javed.

The issue of degrees verification of CDA officers goes back to 2012 when the Cabinet Division had directed the civic agency to verify its officials’ educational credentials. Since then, the CDA issued a number of circulars asking the officials to submit their degrees. The National Accountability Bureau also had taken notice of the issue and directed the civic agency to complete the process at the earliest.  In February 2017, the CDA had issued the order to lodge FIRs against five CDA officials for submission of fake degrees. The FIR was lodged against Qaiser Naseer, Francis Shehzad, Ms Zuriat Waseem, Akash Masih and Syed Zain ul Abaideen. However, no disciplinary action has been taken against the forty-eight employees of CDA whose record from the Security Directorate proved that their educational certificates were found fake during verification by the concerned boards and educational institutions concerned.

It is pertinent to mention here that previous attempts to get the degrees verified have met with severe defiance from HR and administration formations. The matter has lingered on for the past 5 years owing to the indifference and lack of interest of said formations. CDA currently has over 16,000 employees but it is moving in circles over degree verification issue.