Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Franklin Khan is on the hunt for 50 en­gi­neer­ing grad­u­ates to fill spe­cial­ist roles with­in the min­istry.

Row­ley made the an­nounce­ment as he de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at the In­sti­tute of Elec­tri­cal and Elec­tron­ics En­gi­neers' (IEEE) Festschrift Con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency on Mon­day evening.

Speak­ing to the crowd of en­gi­neer­ing prac­ti­tion­ers and revered spe­cial­ists, Row­ley said tax­pay­ers had in­vest­ed a lot of mon­ey in the younger gen­er­a­tion, but de­spite many of them at­tain­ing their qual­i­fi­ca­tions they are lost with­in the sys­tem and many are now em­ployed.

“We have a lot of en­gi­neers in this coun­try who you (tax­pay­ers) paid for, in a va­ri­ety of uni­ver­si­ties, who are left un­der the floor and left to with­er some­where,” the PM said.

“I have in­struct­ed the Min­is­ter (of En­er­gy)…us­ing the skills of a for­mer per­ma­nent sec­re­tary, who’s vol­un­teer­ing, to go look in the sys­tem and see where we have aban­doned these peo­ple. “Some of them with the best train­ing com­ing from the best uni­ver­si­ties in the world and wind up aban­doned, ig­nored or frus­trat­ed some­where in Trinidad and To­ba­go or worse; would have been dri­ven out of Trinidad and To­ba­go as a re­sult of lack of ap­pre­ci­a­tion.”

He said Khan was in­struct­ed to give these new re­cruits spe­cial­ist po­si­tions so that they may de­vel­op the nec­es­sary skills to take the coun­try for­ward.

The PM said he hopes this ven­ture will be able to un­earth the coun­try's next Pro­fes­sor Ken­neth (Ken) Julien, whom he de­scribed as a key play­er re­spon­si­ble for de­vel­op­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go to where it has reached to­day.

Julien was al­so ho­n­oured at the event.

Row­ley al­so said he will be at­tend­ing a two-day meet­ing of the Cari­com Sin­gle Mar­ket Econ­o­my (CSME) at the Hy­att Re­gency next week. The key con­ver­sa­tion at the meet­ing, he ex­plained, will be al­le­ga­tions by oth­er mem­bers that Trinidad and To­ba­go has an un­fair ad­van­tage in Cari­com which needs to be ad­dressed. He said Cari­com coun­ter­parts were com­plain­ing that T&T man­u­fac­tur­ers were get­ting an un­fair ad­van­tage be­cause of cheap en­er­gy prices they were be­ing af­ford­ed here.

“I don't know what would be the out­come of that meet­ing but Trinidad and To­ba­go has forced that con­ver­sa­tion on the heads of Cari­com.”