Sascha Wil­son

As the Gov­ern­ment moves to cre­ate a tech­nol­o­gy-dri­ven Pub­lic Ser­vice, Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion Min­is­ter Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan has em­pha­sised that tech­nol­o­gy could nev­er ful­ly re­place the "face-to-face" con­tact. Ad­dress­ing a prize-giv­ing cer­e­mo­ny for Forms One to Four and Low­er Six at Na­pari­ma Col­lege, San Fer­nan­do, on Fri­day, Seep­er­sad-Bachan told stu­dents: "En­joy and ex­cel in tech­nol­o­gy in the world by all means, but at no point must you see it as a re­place­ment for hu­man con­tact. "At no point must you see it as a sub­sti­tute for face-to-face in­ter­per­son­al so­cial­i­sa­tion," she added. She said her ex­pe­ri­ence in pub­lic life had taught her that in or­der to be suc­cess­ful, there must be a bal­ance be­tween tech­nol­o­gy and "face-to-face" con­tact.

Seep­er­sad-Bachan al­so said that one of the at­tribut­ing fac­tors of the many cat­a­stroph­ic fail­ures in the cor­po­rate world in the last decade could be tech­nol­o­gy. Prin­ci­pal Dr Michael Dowlatt said the school recog­nised the im­por­tance of blend­ing aca­d­e­mics with core and ex­tra-cur­ric­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties. Dur­ing the cer­e­mo­ny, 735 cer­tifi­cates and awards were giv­en out to stu­dents in var­i­ous fields, in­clud­ing aca­d­e­mics, com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice, sports, reg­u­lar­i­ty and punc­tu­al­i­ty.