Old town, new town

A NEW Tengah town, and new looks for Woodlands, Pasir Ris, and Toa Payoh are part of the Ministry of National Development’s $3.8 billion budget. The older towns will be getting new facilities and revamped town centres and Tengah town, near the Jurong Innovation District, will have a “Forest Town” theme. In general, changes will be made to town design to support going car-free (or is it car-lite?) by providing more space for cyclists and pedestrians, and provisions will be made to encourage entrepreneurship in the heartlands.

The Fresh Start scheme, which offers more affordable home ownership to families with children staying in rental flats will also be launched and 18,000 new flats built to meet demand. The ministry said that the supply of new flats will only taper off over the “medium term”. Add that to a previous promise not to remove any property cooling measures for the time being and you can make a guess where property prices are headed.

30,000 jobs, who wants? Minister for Communications and Information Yaacob Ibrahim announced that $120 million will be spent over three years to raise talent to fill the estimated 30,000 new jobs in IT by 2020. Other plans for the ministry include a boost to Wireless@SG – increasing speeds from 2 to 5 Mbps and doubling the number of hotspots to 20,000 by 2018.

MCI also wants to have a National Reading Movement, and a National Reading Day which will be on July 30. The National Library Board wants to bring books to people – but what else is needed to bring people back from tech-fuelled habits of consuming short, social content instead of reading?

Singapore Airlines has finally hired female pilots, making it the last local airline and possibly the last major airline in the world to do so. Two female cadets are part of the airline’s next batch of pilot trainees. The company was mum about why it had not welcomed female candidates until now, saying that they “recruit whoever is the most qualified”, but one unnamed pilot said that this is because women get pregnant and then cease to be “operationally ready”. Maybe you want to tell that to the Air Force? Singapore’s skies are guarded by many “operationally ready” women. And are you wondering where the Tripartite Alliance for Fair Employment (TAFEP) is in all this?

 

Featured image from TMG file. 

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- Daniel Yap