Special Alert: Budget 2009 Snippets [Part 2: Infrastructure Development]

The Budget 2009 allocation for infrastructure development is nothing great to shout about. Amongst the biggest portion goes to human capital development followed by improvement spending in public transportation amenities.

Snippets:

1. The government had allocated RM47.7bn for human capital development (in terms of training and education) to create talented, trained and competitive workforce. Now, this amount is huge, representing 23% of total budget allocation. To us, there had been massive brain drain in the last 10-years plagued by Malaysia's poor salary scheme of working professions and the much dissatisfied governing policies. We think, instead of pouring truck loads of excessive funding into building schools and learning institution that are "half-baked", efforts should be focused on inviting brains back in to Malaysia. If you do not already know, there are a many successful Malaysian outside Malaysia doing extremely well and these talents need to be lured back.



2. This is most probably the most controversial of them lots. RM35bn will be spent for public transportation amenities over 2009 - 2014. Urban commuters sure knows what we meant by controversial. This kind of spending had repeated appeared on the national budget year in and year out, however, none of them could translate into tangible and material improvement to the public transport systems we have. To be honest, the PM should already know the congestion problem in mass transit vehicles (KTM Komuter, STAR-LRT, PUTRA-LRT) before boarding them 2 weeks prior to the budget announcement and claiming that he only found out recently that the quality was not acceptable. Sighhhh .. that's just tooo lat(m)e......






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4. Last 2 years, we went through a whole lot of no-action no follow up big bang hoo-hahh about the 5 economic corridors. Still remember them, if not then let us remind you. The 5 economic corridors are [1] IDR - Iskandar Development Region (Johor), [2] NCER - Northern Corridor Economic Region (Perlis, Kedah, Perak & Penang), [3] ECER - East Coast Economic Region (Terengganu, Kelantan & Pahang) [4] SCORE - Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy [5] SDC - Sabah Development Corridor. The government is going to pump in RM6bn for these corridors.


5. Healthcare get RM13.7bn allocation.


6. Royal Malaysian Police gets RM5.4bn.


7. Only RM1.8bn allocation for the development of basic rural amenities and infrastructure. A bit too little right ???


8. Sabah and Sarawak states gets additional RM3bn and RM3.3bn respectively for development purposes. We wonder if the money has anything to do with possible politician crossing over that has been in the press all this while after the March election.

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