PESHAWAR: College and university students belonging to Khyber Agency have expressed concern over the nonimbursement of annual scholarship to them and demanded of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Iqbal Zafar Jhagra to help resolve the issue.

Speaking at a press conference at Peshawar Press Club on Friday, a leader of Pakhtun Students Federation Abid Afridi said that the scholarship had been pending for second consecutive year and as a result many poor students had to say goodbye to their studies.

Mr Abid said that students had time and again visited the relevant offices, but they were yet to get any satisfactory answer in this regard. Flanked by other PkSF officer-bearers, including general secretary Adnan Samiullah and senior vice-president Irshad Afridi, he pointed out that the scholarship had been released to students in other tribal regions, but in Khyber Agency it was yet to be paid.

He demanded of the Khyber Agency political administration to take steps for the release of annual scholarship to the students. He warned that if the demand was not accepted immediately they would stage protest sit-in outside office of political agent and would also launch a protest campaign.

Mr Abid said that about 3,000 students of the agency studying in dif ferent colleges and universities had been af fected by suspension of the annual scholarship.

He said that the scholarship was given to the Fata students since independence of the country on regular basis, but it was stopped in 2015 due to unknown reasons. Bureau Report