The Star Malaysia

Budget covers needy areas but needs more focus on training the poor

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MANY called the 2017 budget an election budget and the prime minister called it a committed budget, I see it as a needy budget as many needy areas are being covered.

Help is really needed to help the people across the board to overcome the many difficulti­es that they are expected to face in 2017. The budget covers many areas that will benefit the poor like the higher BR1M payouts.

However,it is better to teach the people how to fish than to give them fish which will be better in the long term.

As such, more schools must be built and infrastruc­ture must be in place for the children of the rural areas to have proper schooling which will help to reduce poverty.

The poor, like the many Indian youths from the families of former rubber estates must be given help.

These youths who are without skills have turned to crime. Therefore, funds for setting up of technical centres to train them for skills such as automobile repair, plumbing and electrical can help them towards gainful employment.

Entreprene­urship training programs should be set up to train these youths to be small businessme­n. Small amounts of soft loans can be given to them as capital for them to start a business.

The exemption of the stamp duties for first time buyers of houses with value of up to 300k will help people to own homes.

However, we hope the value will extend to 450k as most of the affordable houses built by developers in Klang valley, Penang, Johore Bahru, are around this value.

News that some 2,400 medical, dentistry and pharmacy graduates will be absorbed by contracts in 2017 is very heartening.

The country’s 200,000 unemployed graduates also need help and we hope this can be extended to them.

It has been said that many are unemployed due to their poor proficienc­y in English. If this true, steps must be taken to help them in this area.

We will be facing strong competitio­n from countries like Myanmar in the near future so we need to equip our people with good skills, like proficienc­y in English, to compete.

Looking back, many foreign companies set up factories in our country in the seventies and eighties even though our labour cost was higher than in our neighbouri­ng countries because we had a large pool of English proficient people, besides some good incentives given to them.

We hope more efforts and funds will be made available to improve English proficienc­y among children, especially those in less developed areas.

We also hope that there will be funds in future budgets to encourage the use of technology to reduce the country’s dependance on foreign workers. THOMAS FOO Subang Jaya

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