Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is rec­om­mend­ing unique e-iden­ti­ty cards for every cit­i­zen as a means of elim­i­nat­ing wastage and cor­rup­tion in the post-COVID-19 world.

Ad­dress­ing the team dur­ing last week’s meet­ing with the Roadmap to Re­cov­ery team, Row­ley said T&T has been un­der­per­form­ing and had failed to utilise tech­nol­o­gy like oth­er coun­tries. 

Say­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic was forc­ing T&T to be­come bet­ter than be­fore, Row­ley said, “I want to tell the pre­sen­ters that you have giv­en me such great hope that this ex­er­cise will pro­duce what I an­tic­i­pat­ed.”

Mak­ing ref­er­ence to the pre­sen­ta­tion done by labour stal­wart Michelle An­nisette, Row­ley said the use of key e-iden­ti­ty cards such as those used in Es­to­nia will go a long way to bet­ter man­age­ment of the coun­try’s re­sources.

“It is in­ter­est­ing that this idea has come from labour. I was very in­trigued that he men­tioned Es­to­nia, which tells me that we are on the same wave­length, Es­to­nia is the same size of T&T in terms of pop­u­la­tion. It is a slight­ly big­ger econ­o­my...and Es­to­nia is such a well run coun­try on the ba­sis of that key iden­ti­ty and it helps with ef­fec­tive man­age­ment of that pop­u­la­tion,” Row­ley said.

He said if a key e-iden­ti­ty sys­tem was in place in T&T it would have been eas­i­er to dis­trib­ute the so­cial grants to the vul­ner­a­ble mem­bers of the pop­u­la­tion dur­ing the cur­rent COVID lock­down mea­sures.

“When we look at what is avail­able to us, we have been un­der­per­form­ing and we should take this op­por­tu­ni­ty and try to per­form bet­ter. Noth­ing will make us per­form bet­ter than a trans­for­ma­tion where pub­lic gov­er­nance and ad­min­is­tra­tion is based on key iden­ti­ty,” Row­ley added.

He said Gov­ern­ment cur­rent­ly has the la­bo­ri­ous task of ex­am­in­ing every so­cial as­sis­tance grant ap­pli­ca­tion to en­sure help went where it was need­ed.

Mean­while, for­mer per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Al­li­son Lewis ad­mit­ted it was dif­fi­cult get­ting re­sources to the peo­ple through the cur­rent sys­tem.

“Hav­ing a prop­er data­base and the abil­i­ty to ad­dress the peo­ple most who are in need is one of the most crit­i­cal things we have to do. The Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment has a par­tic­u­lar data­base and with this present sit­u­a­tion, it is bring­ing more peo­ple in­to this sys­tem.

“We are not in a po­si­tion and there is no mech­a­nism for us to get them in­to the sys­tem and to en­sure they get their needs met. We have men­tal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly dis­abled chil­dren that have to be dealt with as well,” Lewis said.

She not­ed that while non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions were do­ing their part, there was no way of know­ing whether the so­cial net was in­clud­ing every­one or whether there were peo­ple ben­e­fit­ing from aid not in­tend­ed for them. (See page 6)

Econ­o­mist and spe­cial­ist in health eco­nom­ics Pro­fes­sor Karl Theodore al­so said there was a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion who could not pro­vide for them­selves. He ques­tioned the ef­fi­cien­cy of the aid, not­ing there should al­so be train­ing pro­grammes for peo­ple so they could even­tu­al­ly look af­ter them­selves.

Busi­ness­man Ger­ry Brooks, who is vice chair­man of the team, said the re­turn to work pro­to­cols were now be­ing de­vel­oped. 

“We want to re­turn to work in a safe and con­struc­tive man­ner. We want to make sure there are COVID-ready re­spons­es. Nine­ty-nine per cent of the sec­tors say they are ready to mo­bilise,” Brookes said.

He not­ed that the HDC had 72 on­go­ing projects which em­ployed 13,000 peo­ple. He said there were 12 projects which could start with­in a month and nine ten­dered projects which could em­ploy 600 more peo­ple, adding the HDC alone could gen­er­ate $1.6 bil­lion in ac­tiv­i­ties.

Ernst & Young Caribbean ex­ec­u­tive chair­man Col­in Soo Pin Chow said small en­tre­pre­neurs had de­vel­oped pro­to­cols for the even­tu­al re­open­ing of their busi­ness­es, adding he hoped the ease of do­ing busi­ness could be im­proved in the fu­ture.