Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif distributed laptops and Honhaar scholarships among students at a ceremony held at COMSATS University in Attock on Tuesday, in an event that also included students from Swabi in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. According to an official handout, the students from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa thanked the Punjab government for extending the scholarship programme beyond provincial boundaries, saying the financial assistance had helped them pay semester fees of nearly Pakistani Rupees 200,000. At the ceremony, the chief minister handed over laptops and scholarship cheques to students and was also presented with portraits and sketches prepared by them.
On the laptop side, students across the Rawalpindi division received devices in several categories. The list included 628 laptops for students of public universities, 257 for private university students, 461 for medical colleges, 375 for nursing colleges, 17 for special education institutions, and 423 for colleges under the Higher Education Department. A personal computer is now a basic requirement for coursework, research, online classes, and freelancing, yet many deserving students cannot afford one, and a laptop provided through a public scheme removes one of the main obstacles to taking part in digital learning and to building technology skills while still at university. The chief minister has raised the number of laptops allocated for deserving students from 40,000 to 112,000, and 48,292 devices have already been distributed in different districts of Punjab.
The Honhaar Scholarship Programme was the other part of the ceremony. In the Rawalpindi division, 2,590 scholarships worth Pakistani Rupees 196.97 million were awarded. Of these, 2,085 scholarships worth Pakistani Rupees 170.21 million went to students of public universities, 314 scholarships worth Pakistani Rupees 19.8 million were given to students of medical universities and colleges, and 191 scholarships worth Pakistani Rupees 6.96 million were awarded to students of colleges under the Higher Education Department. The programme covers students enrolled in public and private universities, federally chartered universities, BS colleges, special education institutions, and medical and dental colleges, so it reaches a wide range of institutions. Under its first three phases, 108,000 students have received scholarships.
Taken together, the laptop scheme and the scholarship programme address two costs that often decide whether a student completes a degree, which are tuition and the equipment needed to study. Extending the scholarships to students from Swabi, a district in another province, adds a notable feature to the programme and shows how education support can cross provincial lines. The larger laptop allocation of 112,000 devices suggests that the provincial government expects demand to remain high, and the next phases will show how quickly the remaining laptops reach students in other divisions and how the scholarship money is distributed among public and private institutions. For students in smaller cities, the combined support offers a practical way to continue their education and to gain the digital skills that employers and freelance clients now expect.
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