Sascha Wil­son

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar opened a $2.9 mil­lion so­cial ser­vices cen­tre in Rio Claro on Wednes­day putting an end to res­i­dents jour­ney­ing for miles to ac­cess those ser­vices. De­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress, Per­sad-Bisses­sar de­scribed the fa­cil­i­ty as a one-stop shop with in­te­grat­ed ser­vices.

Pre­vi­ous­ly res­i­dents would have had to jour­ney to San Fer­nan­do or Port-of-Spain to ac­cess those so­cial pro­grammes and ser­vices. In­di­cat­ing that it was the first of its kind in the coun­try, she said, "You will now be able to make all queries, sub­mit ap­pli­ca­tions, ob­tain coun­selling and guid­ance, and even pick up de­liv­er­ables at this very lo­ca­tion."

With the re­cent ap­pli­ca­tion process im­ple­ment­ed by the min­istry she said the time be­tween the ap­pli­ca­tion, ap­proval and de­liv­ery of ser­vice was at an all time low, es­pe­cial­ly re­gard­ing the TTCard and its as­so­ci­at­ed pro­gramme, stat­ing that the ob­jec­tive was to ad­dress the needs of all cit­i­zens. Min­is­ter of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment Dr Glenn Ra­mad­hars­ingh an­nounced the con­struc­tion of an $11.5 mil­lion cen­tre for the dif­fer­ent­ly-abled at Carlsen Field in Cen­tral Trinidad. He did not give any spe­cif­ic de­tails, in­clud­ing whether a con­tract was award­ed or the date for the start of con­struc­tion.

De­scrib­ing the cen­tre as a state-of-the-art fa­cil­i­ty, Ra­mad­hars­ingh said in many ways, the new and up­dat­ed cen­tre blazes the trail for so­cial de­liv­ery in the coun­try. "We in­tend above all, to do away with resched­ul­ing and point­ing you to an­oth­er door to ac­cess what you need," he said. These in­clude the TTCard, Na­tion­al Fam­i­ly Ser­vices and Pover­ty Re­duc­tion Pro­gramme.