Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has as­sured cit­i­zens that fire­walls will be placed on every lap­top giv­en to SEA stu­dents to pre­vent them from ac­cess­ing neg­a­tive Web sites. Speak­ing at a po­lit­i­cal meet­ing on High Street, Siparia, on Sun­day night, Per­sad-Bisses­sar vowed to ful­fil every promise she made on the gen­er­al elec­tion cam­paign trail.

"We have made promis­es to you on the cam­paign trail. I will do every­thing I can to make sure we keep that promise. "The Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion tells me we are well on the way to keep­ing it. Now tonight I may say if it takes us a week or two or three, be as­sured that promise will be kept," Per­sad-Bisses­sar said. She added: "I will give every child a com­put­er who wrote that SEA ex­am, you know why? Be­cause chil­dren are our fu­ture. There are some peo­ple say­ing that we go­ing to give these lap­tops and com­put­ers to chil­dren and the chil­dren will get vi­o­lent and the chil­dren shouldn't have com­put­ers... what non­sense!"

She said: "When par­ents have the mon­ey, they buy the lap­tops for their chil­dren. They give them com­put­ers so why shouldn't the poor par­ents and the poor fam­i­ly al­so have a lap­top?"

She promised to work with her in­ter-min­is­te­r­i­al teams to en­sure that stu­dents were pro­tect­ed. She said: "I will work with the Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion, the whole Cab­i­net will work with him and we'll put up what they call fire­walls to pre­vent the chil­dren from ac­cess­ing the bad sites. "You don't want them to go on the bad Web sites, so we will put fire­walls to block it so that they can­not ac­cess things that our chil­dren should not have ac­cess to. "We will al­low our chil­dren to ac­cess the world of knowl­edge and the world of the fu­ture. The fu­ture is in the tech­nol­o­gy and in the lap­tops," Per­sad-Bisses­sar said. Al­though she ad­mit­ted that the "mon­ey sit­u­a­tion was tight," Per­sad-Bisses­sar said she was com­mit­ted to open­ing up the world of tech­nol­o­gy to the 11-year-olds.

"That's a promise that we will keep, even if it takes us at least two, three weeks in Sep­tem­ber, they will get those lap­tops. "We promised that with­in 30 days of the con­ven­ing of the Par­lia­ment, I will lay a bill in Par­lia­ment to en­sure there is not a se­nior cit­i­zen that gets less than $3,000 a month," Per­sad-Bisses­sar. She said for the past three years she begged the PNM regime to in­crease old age pen­sion. "They nev­er did. They raised it by a $100. But we will give them the $3,000," Per­sad-Bisses­sar said. She said there was a dis­con­nect in the Siparia Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion and it was im­per­a­tive to have Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship coun­cil­lors elect­ed so that they could work close­ly with the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment to im­prove the lives of cit­i­zens.