HRP claims Indians marginalised again

Human Rights Party(HRP) pro tem sec-gen P Uthayakumar say the budget would not do anything to change the lives of the poor Indians.

KUALA LUMPUR: Human Rights Party(HRP) pro tem sec-gen P Uthayakumar said Budget 2012 is merely old wine in new bottles and would hardly do anything to change for the lives of the ordinary Indian poor.

“Just like in any previous years. Look at the RM90 million for the orang asli, they only represent 0.1% of the nation’s population, but they’ve been allocated so much. The ground reality of the Indian poor should at least be given 1% total budget(RM2.328billion) for them to take part in mainstream development as they have been left so far back, and segregated,” he said.

Uthayakumar welcomed the move to remove road tax for individually owned taxis but said that all taxis should be individually owned.
“Currently taxis have to pay a company,why should permits be given to company, that should be done away with.” he said.

He also expressed disappointment with the legal aid allocation increase from RM10million to RM15million. “If we count the population of 28million, it works out to RM53.57 cents per head, which is not even enough to file a summons in court!”

“As usual, as in the previous budgets, there essentially is no delivery machenism to filter to the Indian poor. In 2009 when Najib was Deputy Prime Minister, he announced RM100million for Tamil schools , four or five months later a news report that said zero went down to the ordinary Indians because of price of materials had gone up.

” Where did the money go,” he asked.