For the first time since the in­cep­tion of the RBTT Young Lead­ers Great De­bate, a team from Queen's Roy­al Col­lege (QRC) has won the cov­et­ed ti­tle. Rep­re­sent­ing the school were Mattheus Schmid­ham­mer, Christo­pher Thomp­son, and re­serve Kieron Em­manuel, who ar­gued against the mo­tion in a keen­ly de­lib­er­at­ed con­test against Bran­don Joseph and Dar­weshi Bap­tiste of St Mary's Col­lege.

The boys de­bat­ed the mo­tion "Be it re­solved that the pri­vati­sa­tion of our wa­ter re­sources will en­sure a sup­ply of wa­ter for every­one" at the fi­nal round of the de­bate com­pe­ti­tion, at the Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence in Ma­coya on No­vem­ber 30.Wa­ter: Be­yond the Sur­face–Sus­tain­ing Life, Se­cur­ing our Fu­ture was the theme for this year's Young Lead­ers pro­gramme, and over the past nine weeks, stu­dents from 52 schools ar­gued points for and against the is­sue of wa­ter sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

St Mary's Col­lege chal­lenged WASA's abil­i­ty to ful­fil its man­date to pro­vide wa­ter for all, cit­ing mis­man­age­ment and wastage as the com­pa­ny's pri­ma­ry down­fall. Through pri­vati­sa­tion, St Mary's as­sert­ed, the wa­ter agency would be com­pelled to pro­vide su­pe­ri­or ser­vice be­cause its prof­itabil­i­ty would de­pend on it. QRC ar­gued that wa­ter was a ba­sic ne­ces­si­ty for life, and wast­ed no time re­but­ting St Mary's point, stat­ing that a prof­it-dri­ven, pri­va­tised wa­ter com­pa­ny's first re­spon­si­bil­i­ty would be to its share­hold­ers and not the cit­i­zens of T&T, which meant cit­i­zens could be sub­ject­ed to pay­ing high prices for a ba­sic hu­man right.

The fi­nal de­bate test­ed the boys' abil­i­ty to con­vinc­ing­ly ar­tic­u­late their po­si­tion and think on their feet, as their op­po­nents tried to un­nerve them with their ag­gres­sive points of in­for­ma­tion. The de­bate com­pe­ti­tion, which was in­tro­duced in 2002, pro­vides a fo­rum for stu­dents to de­vel­op and im­prove their pub­lic-speak­ing, re­search and writ­ing skills, as they pre­pare ar­gu­ments in re­sponse to mo­tions that co­in­cide with a new theme each year.

Pres­i­dent and coun­try head, RBTT Bank, Arvin­der Bharath, praised the teams on ac­cept­ing the chal­lenge to con­sid­er is­sues of na­tion­al and glob­al sig­nif­i­cance.