Min­is­ter of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment Dr Glenn Ra­mad­hars­ingh says the Gov­ern­ment is ac­tive­ly deal­ing with the prob­lem of street dwellers. He made the state­ment yes­ter­day dur­ing a news con­fer­ence at his Ca­roni Cen­tral of­fice in Freeport. He said said one of the main pil­lars of the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment was pover­ty erad­i­ca­tion, so­cial jus­tice and in­clu­sion.

Ra­mad­hars­ingh said high pri­or­i­ty was be­ing placed on home­less peo­ple. He was re­spond­ing to a re­port in yes­ter­day's T&T Guardian which said the street-dweller pop­u­la­tion grew by 13.4 per cent over the decade 2000 to 2011. The largest con­cen­tra­tion was in Port-of-Spain.

That fig­ure was re­vealed by Dave Clement, di­rec­tor of sta­tis­tics of the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO), dur­ing a press con­fer­ence by the Min­istry of Plan­ning and the Econ­o­my at the Er­ic Williams Fi­nan­cial Com­plex, Port-of-Spain, on Mon­day. Ra­mad­hars­ingh said the 13 per cent quot­ed in the re­port was 50 years old and was com­piled by the CSO over the last ten years.

He said the home­less prob­lem was in­her­it­ed from pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tions which did lit­tle. He said over the last two years, the PP Gov­ern­ment has done in­tense work and made great ef­forts to deal with the so­cial­ly-dis­placed. His min­istry, he added, had been hold­ing meet­ings with sev­er­al in­ter­est groups.

The min­is­ter said 37 hom­less peo­ple were vol­un­tar­i­ly re­moved in De­cem­ber. He said while the re­moval ex­er­cise con­tin­ued, leg­is­la­tion to re­move peo­ple who do not want to leave the streets vol­un­tar­i­ly was be­fore the leg­isla­tive re­view com­mis­sion.