HYDERABAD  - Sindh University’s Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Fateh Muhammad Burfat has said a conference themed over research initiatives offered a great learning opportunity and a platform to academic and professional networking. 

This he said at the inaugural ceremony of 3-day 1st International Conference titled ‘Contemporary Sociology, Social Sciences and Sustainable Development 2018’.  

Prof Burfat said such conferences also offered input to the policymakers besides enriching the academicians who learn new ideas and get acquainted with the latest trends in their fields. 

“As a sociologist, I am glad to partake with you that today sociology has more than 600 branches. Sociology pervades human life in all its spheres. Let it be an individual, an institution, a society or customs, traditions, health, development, backwardness, rites, rituals and life styles or human behaviour, decisions, plans and attitudes,” he observed. The VC congratulated Prof Dr Nagina Parveen Soomro, Dean Faculty of Social Sciences and others for successfully organizing the international moot for the first time ever in the varsity’s history. 

Dr Shaikh Tanveer Ahmed, Chief Executive of non-profit organization HANDS, said sociology was essentially all about social development through sensitive and improved understanding of social dynamics of any given society. 

“To me, development principally means human development. Any progress which doesn’t include human happiness and elevation or does not add to human joys, comforts, health, well being, emotional delight, spiritual ecstasy, financial uplift, knowledge escalation and personal freedom and contentment will, in my view, not qualify to be called as ‘development,” he elaborated. 

The keynote speaker of the session YU Xiahofeng of Zhejiang University of China spoke about the sociological aspects of individual, institutional, organizational, regional, national, international and gender aspects of security. He outlined sociological security in traditional and non-traditional types while recommending future research on the spoken areas.Dr Gul Muhammad Baloch from Malaysia touched upon the conference’s theme from the angle of health hazards. 

He said human health depended largely upon sociological setup of societies and that every society left some particular implications on human nature, temperament, disposition, attitude and behavior.“Understanding such sociological dimensions was imperative towards understanding why particular individuals or groups behaved the way they did”, he remarked.Another academician from Malaysia Prof Dr Sivapalan Selvadurai talked about the economics of sociology. 

In his erudite presentation, he drove the point home that many developing countries were constructing their own social protection policies and despite their variety those social protection pathways shared common features. 

 He added that social protection response in middle income countries in the wake of Asian economic crisis in the 1997 and the global financial crisis in 2008 mandated the countries to specify their security needs under sociological perspective.Prof Dr Arfana Begum Mallah, President Sindh University Teachers’ Association (SUTA) and Member SU Syndicate expressed her disappointment over lack of research in the subjects of social sciences as compared to the natural sciences. 

She underlined the importance of the social sciences to emphasize on the need of research.Earlier, Prof Dr Aijaz Ali Wassan, Chairman, Department of Sociology welcomed the scholars while Dr Ameer Ali Abro, secretary of the conference shared the conference’s brief.