Dr Atta-ur-Rehman HEC Head what a personality man

[BlackRock]

 

[abdullah01]

One Correction: Pakistan NEVER sent any satellite in space. The satellite the author is referring to was BOUGHT from an foreign company and the satellite was ALREADY in space when Bought. The reason to buy was strategic so as to reserve an orbit in space for Future Pakistani Satellite becuase the orbits were getting full. Till now Pakistan has NOT achieved any Satellite Launch capabilities, so I guess, unfortunately, we have no right to say "We did it before 3 year than India"... because we haven't even done it yet :(

 

[PakPatriot1]

I think author reffering the following:

Pakistani official on future uses of geo-stationary satellite.
Source: Asia Africa Intelligence Wire

Publication Date: 05-JAN-03

(From BBC Monitoring International Reports)

January

Islamabad: Chairman Higher Education Commission [HEC] Dr Attaur Rehman on Saturday [4 January] said Pakistan's first communication satellite, Paksat-I, would be used for educational purposes.

He said a significant portion of the satellite will be used for educational purposes for which the transponders will be made available free of charge. The Higher Education Commission has launched a major national project to use the capabilities of the satellite which has 34 transponders.

Pakistan's first large communication satellite was placed in a geo-stationary orbit on 17 December, 2002 thereby successfully completing 18 months of intensive efforts to occupy the slot in space at 30 degrees east. Under this project contents in different fields of science, technology, social sciences and humanities will be prepared and broadcast to various universities in the country. This programme will also benefit from the Pakistan educational network which was launched recently by President Musharraf.

Under this programme, 57 public and private sector universities are being linked together through fibre optic so that the faculty resources can be shared and lectures given by eminent professionals in one part of the country can be listened to by students in other part of the country.

This new initiative of the Higher Education Commission will also allow live lectures from MIT, Stanford and other top institutions in the West to be channelled through Paksat-I and be accessible to students and faculty members in various universities of Pakistan.

The Virtual University has been given the responsibility to initiate series of lectures. It is expected that the foreign lecture programme will be initiated later this summer, as soon as the universities have suitable internal computerization and networking facilities to receive live broadcasts.

In this connection, projects of a large number of public sector universities for installation of routers, LAN [Local Area Network] and computerization of different departments are presently in process. Eleven such projects from universities were recently approved in the DDWP meeting held at the HEC main campus. These projects are for University of Karachi University of Peshawar, University of Arid Agriculture Rawalpindi, Allama Iqbal Open University, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Mehran University of Engineering and Technology and HEC Islamabad.

The field of distance learning offers high quality educational broadcast and massive investments have been made in this area even in advanced countries such as Canada and Australia. A number of developing countries are also adopting this technology and Mexico has made significant progress in this respect. Pakistan, during the last two years has developed a world class infrastructure and it has the highest Internet penetration in the developing world with some 1025 cities, towns and villages having Internet facilities covering 95 per cent of the country.

Fibre optic has also spread to over 240 towns and cities. A very robust platform has, therefore, been created for using Paksat-I for educational purposes. A project has been approved for starting four new digital TV channels in Pakistan exclusively for educational purposes.

Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) has recently granted licences for two such channels which will start functioning later this year and programmes at Paksat-I can be broadcast through these channels in Pakistan. In this field, Pakistan is well ahead of the neighbouring countries, which are now planning to launch similar satellite having 34 transponders for educational purposes in the year 2006 to use distance learning for education and training.

Source: The News web site, Islamabad, in English 5 Jan 03

/[c] BBC Monitoring

ANY HOW WE SHOULD BE PROUD OF REMARKABLE WORK OF DR. ATTA AND FORMER PRESIDENT MR. MUSHARRAF. NOW WE ARE MISSING THESE GREAT PEOPLE.