Rhon­da Krys­tal Ram­bal­ly

MP for Moru­ga/Table­land Clifton De Coteau says the vil­lage of Marac in Moru­ga lacks In­ter­net con­nec­tiv­i­ty and called on IGovTT to en­sure stu­dents and oth­er vil­lagers were not de­prived of this use­ful re­source. De Coteau said he was hop­ing for the best and that the area did not re­main in a rur­al state.

He was speak­ing in Par­lia­ment on Wednes­day dur­ing a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee meet­ing in­to the in­quiry of the ad­min­is­tra­tion and meth­ods of func­tion­ing of the Na­tion­al In­for­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Tech­nol­o­gy Com­pa­ny Ltd brand­ed as IGovTT.

IGovTT was rep­re­sent­ed by its chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer (CEO) Cleve­land Thomas and nine oth­er of­fi­cials in­clud­ing per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Pub­lic In­for­ma­tion Ar­lene Mc­Comie. De Coteau said: "I re­al­ly lis­tened in­tent­ly with some de­gree of hope be­cause I heard when you said the re­quire­ment of every con­ces­sion­aire is to en­sure that there is cov­er­age through­out T&T and by ex­ten­sion the rur­al par­adise of Moru­ga...Marac to be ex­act, where we have a beau­ti­ful Bap­tist school perched on a hill with ab­solute­ly no con­nec­tiv­i­ty in the area.

"So I am ask­ing whether...I am rais­ing this...I am ven­ti­lat­ing this loud that the pow­ers that be re­alise that this is an area...bril­liant chil­dren who should not be de­prived." Mean­while, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Tim Gopeesingh said 152 schools had In­ter­net con­nec­tiv­i­ty and that IGovTT was in­stru­men­tal in mov­ing from three megabytes to five megabytes. Gopeesingh added of the 470 pri­ma­ry schools, there were com­put­er labs "in about over 300." Re­spond­ing to the ques­tion of na­tion­al In­ter­net pen­e­tra­tion lev­el, Thomas said it was 40 per cent by house­hold.

Gopeesingh asked if the in­tro­duc­tion of lap­top ini­tia­tive made a dif­fer­ence. Thomas re­spond­ed: "The av­er­age num­ber of stu­dents we are talk­ing about an­nu­al­ly, it's about 20,000 com­put­ers for the one lap­top per child ini­tia­tive. "If we main­tain that amount we are close to 100,000 com­put­ers by the end of the five-year pe­ri­od, tak­ing pen­e­tra­tion in­to ac­count just on­ly on those num­bers...100,000 to­day to the mil­lion-plus peo­ple on av­er­age...it should go up by at least an­oth­er ten per cent."