Sindh moves to raise university professors' retirement age from 60 to 65

The Sindh government will ask the provincial cabinet to raise the retirement age of university professors from 60 to 65, Chief Secretary Asif Hyder Shah told a meeting with the vice-chancellors of 32 public sector universities, ProPakistani reported. The proposal is not yet law: a summary will go to the cabinet, which has to approve it.

The meeting was attended by the chairman of the Sindh Higher Education Commission and the secretary of universities and boards along with the vice-chancellors.

Why Sindh wants senior teachers to stay

The province's universities are short of experienced faculty. According to the meeting, they are losing senior staff in three directions:

• to private universities, which pay more;
• to jobs abroad, with some teachers who go overseas reluctant to come back;
• to retirement at 60, which pushes out professors at the peak of their research careers, while their pensions add to the universities' costs.

Keeping professors five more years would delay those pension payments and keep supervisors for PhD and MPhil students in place.

The money problem

Sindh is giving its public universities Rs 44.46 billion in grants this financial year, and the meeting heard that pensions and electricity bills are eating into budgets. The chief secretary asked universities to:

1. stop hiring non-teaching staff where possible;
2. move to solar power and cut illegal electricity connections on campus;
3. carry out feasibility studies before any new campus is approved;
4. send research proposals to the government for funding.

Recommendations on the make-up of university syndicates, including members with education backgrounds, will also go to the cabinet.

What it means for you

For a professor turning 60 in the next year, nothing changes until the cabinet approves the summary and a notification is issued; until then the current rule applies. Work out your exact retirement date and service length with our age and retirement calculator, and see what your end-of-service payout looks like with the gratuity calculator.

For students, a longer career for senior faculty means fewer departments left without supervisors.

What happens next

The summary goes to the Sindh cabinet. We will update this story when the cabinet decides and the notification is published.