JAI JAGAT : Welcome to the World’s Biggest School: City Montessori School (Lucknow, India)

Welcome to the World’s Biggest School
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the City Montessori School in Lucknow, India, has 39,437 pupils and 2,500 teachers.
By Patrick Boehler | October 15, 201

Lucknow

, the capital city of India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, is now home to the world’s biggest school, according to the new edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. The last academic year, 2,500 teachers taught a mind-boggling 39,437 students in 1,000 classrooms at Lucknow’s City Montessori School. According to the school’s website, it now boasts over 44,000 pupils.

The school was founded in 1959 by Bharti and Jagdish Gandhi with just 300 borrowed rupees ($5.70 at current exchange rates) and a total of five students. More than half a century later, the school, which spreads over several campuses, can’t gather for assembly as there is no venue in town that is big enough. Students ages between three and 17 are divided into classrooms of 45 children each; every pupil wears identical school uniforms, AFP reports. Younger students pay about $18, older students $47 in fees per month. The school held the record once before, in 2005, when it had 29,212 pupils — beating a school in the Philippines with roughly 20,000 pupils.

Uttar Pradesh is in dire need of schools. The Northern state has a literacy rate below India’s national average of 74% and ranks 29th among India’s 35 administrative divisions, according to the 2011 census. Lucknow’s City Montessori School not only excels in size, it has over the years been showered in awards and recognition. In 2002, it received the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education. Two years ago, the Dalai Lama conferred his Hope for Humanity award to the school founder.

The size of the Gandhis school, which does not receive government funding, is however dwarfed by the world’s largest university, also in India. The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in Delhi has no less than four million students — ten times larger than its U.S. equivalent, the online University of Phoenix.

India, a country of extremes, boasts some other, more obscure, records: nowhere have there been more people standing on one moving motorcycle (54), has a larger foreign object been left in a patient (a pair of 13 inch-long artery forceps) or a higher number of green coconuts been smashed in one minute by elbows (92, 7 of which were disqualified).

World's biggest school gives Indian kids lessons for life

By Sagarika Dubey (AFP) – 1 day ago

LUCKNOW, India — The first day in class for any new pupil can be an overwhelming experience, so imagine arriving for lessons as one of 40,000 pupils on the roll-call of the world's biggest school.

The latest edition of Guinness World Records awards the title to the City Montessori School in the Indian city of Lucknow with 39,437 registered pupils in the 2010-2011 academic year.

The school says that enrollment numbers have already risen above 45,000, with 2,500 teachers, 3,700 computers, 1,000 classrooms -- and one of the hardest first eleven cricket teams to break into.

CMS, as it is known, was opened by Jagdish Gandhi and his wife Bharti in 1959 with a loan of 300 rupees ($6 at current rates) and just five pupils.

Today it sprawls over 20 sites in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh state, and is as famous for its exam results and international exchange programmes as for its scale.

"The phenomenal growth of our school is a reflection of our efforts to please our parents with our service to their children," said Gandhi, who is still involved in the school's management at the age of 75.

"Our students have exceptional academic results each year and outstanding global exposure. Getting this Guinness record is heartening but it's not just about size," he told AFP.

The pupils, who are aged between three and 17, all wear uniform and each class has about 45 members, but the whole school never gathers for assembly as there is nowhere big enough to hold them.

CMS, which receives no government funding, charges 1,000 rupees a month in fees for younger pupils, rising to 2,500 a month for seniors.

"In such a large school, there are many advantages, one being you get to make a lot of friends across the many sites that we have," Ritika Ghosh, 14, who has been at CMS for two years, told AFP.

"But as the school is so huge it takes a lot of effort to get noticed. Otherwise you are just one of the thousands that study.

"There are certainly more challenges and competitions, which in the end prepares us for real life."

Fellow pupil Tanmay Tiwari, 16, credits the large size of the school for making him more outgoing.

"I used to be very shy but the school has given me that confidence," he told AFP. "Now I am in the college team, debating in national competitions."

The school's size is matched only by its idealistic ambitions, with pupils taught a philosophy of universal peace and globalism under the motto "Jai Jagat" (Victory be to the World).

With pupils under fierce pressure to get good exam results, sport is not always a top priority, but cricket coach Raju Singh Chauhan says selecting a team is still tricky.

"To fish out sports talent in the 45,000-plus students can be a huge problem," he said.

"For this reason we hold inter-branch competitions to dig out the best children and then eventually we get the bigger picture and our best eleven for the team."

CMS first held the title of the world's biggest school in 2005, when it had 29,212 pupils, beating the previous record holder, the Rizal High School in Manila, Philippines, which had 19,738 pupils.

Alumni include Ushhan Gundevia, an executive banker at Goldman Sachs, and Prakash Gupta, a senior United Nations diplomat in New York, as well as Harvard scholars and several leading surgeons and scientists.

"The school is an inspiration not only to the pupils, but also to anyone, anywhere who wants to make a positive difference," Craig Glenday, editor-in-chief of Guinness World Records, told AFP from London.

"The school understands that teaching is the most sacred of professions, and from humble origins to being the largest and one of the most respected educational establishment in the world, it is a truly awe-inspiring story."

Current nuclear technology not suitable for Singapore

Current nuclear technology not suitable for Singapore
Published : Tuesday, October 16th, 2012
By : The Straits Times
Category : Energy
Region : Singapore
Tags : energy security, natural gas, nuclear, power plants, research

Current nuclear energy technology is not suitable for Singapore, a pre-feasibility study has concluded.

Mr S. Iswaran, Second Minister for Trade and Industry, said in Parliament yesterday that the risks of housing a nuclear power plant here to generate electricity still outweigh the benefits, given the country’s size and dense population.

But the two-year study by government agencies, external consultants and independent expert advisers, in response to an Economic Strategies Committee recommendation in 2010, did not rule out nuclear energy totally.

It recommended that Singapore continue to monitor new technologies.

The country also needs to strengthen capabilities to understand nuclear science and technology, and in emergency response and radioactive waste disposal, said Mr Iswaran, who is also Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office and Second Minister for Home Affairs.

Many of the Republic’s Asean neighbours are planning to build nuclear power plants. Vietnam aims to build 10 nuclear reactors by 2030. Malaysia is studying having one in operation by 2021.

Hence, Singapore should also play a role in global and regional cooperation on nuclear safety. It is, for example, a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, an inter-governmental body that promotes the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

Dr T.S. Gopi Rethinaraj, an assistant professor and nuclear energy expert at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, is not surprised the nation has ruled out the nuclear option for now.

“Current technology may not be suitable,” he said. This is because the designs require large safety buffers, including an uninhabited zone with a 2km radius and a 5km low-density zone.

Newer, safer designs exist only on paper, he added. These would be at least 20 to 30 years from commercial development.

“In the foreseeable future, the best bet would be natural gas in the near term,” he said.

Singapore aims to have a stable, economically competitive supply of energy while minimising carbon emissions and pollution. Eighty per cent of electricity is generated from natural gas piped from Indonesia and Malaysia. It has limited scope for solar, wind and other renewable energies.

But a liquefied natural gas terminal, set to begin operations next year, will allow Singapore to import gas from other countries.

This and the growth of unconventional gas sources like shale gas could help alleviate Singapore’s energy security concerns even without a nuclear power plant, said Dr Michael Quah of NUS’ chemical and biomolecular engineering department.

And even if Singapore does not build a nuclear plant, others in the region will, and it can help train people for regulatory and other industry roles. “Nuclear has long coat-tails. Where in the supply chain can we develop manpower?” said Dr Quah.

http://www.eco-business.com/news/current-nuclear-technology-not-suitable-for-singapore/

Tough choices as nations go grey

Tough choices as nations go grey

Editorial Desk
The Straits Times
Publication Date : 13-10-2012

The United Nations has tried, not too persuasively, to argue that rapid global ageing is a cause for celebration notwithstanding the challenges to be met. Its Population Fund (UNFPA) prefers to see a silver lining of rising life expectancy in the dark demographic cloud - one in nine people in the world is 60 or older, a ratio to rise to one in five by 2050. Developing world populations are growing old more quickly than those elsewhere.

Singapore, certainly, must take the problem more seriously than all of its neighbours in South-East Asia. With 15.5 per cent of its population above 60 this year, a proportion projected to rise to 37.8 per cent by 2050, it is the most acute case. Only Thailand comes close, behind by about 2 per cent currently. Those above 60 form a bigger population segment in Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea, with all growing old at a comparable speed. Other developed countries - the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and almost all European nations - have an even bigger proportion of seniors than Singapore does.

This offers Singapore a chance to learn from the experiences of such developed nations. UNFPA has summarised necessary, if obvious, lessons: Prepare government, civil society, private sector, communities and families for the inevitability of population ageing by enhancing understanding, strengthening capacity, and implementing essential social, economic and political reforms. In practice, Singapore copes in its own way. It is trying to offset the declining ratio of workers to retirees with a holistic combination of policy options - use foreign labour, enhance fertility, raise productivity, encourage women and seniors to continue working, and so on.

UNFPA is realistic in assessing that some of these steps "are not likely to compensate for population ageing". The disappointing response to Baby Bonus incentives suggests that "the scope for increasing fertility is also only limited", as it noted. Immigration measures that succeed in attracting foreign talent have led to unhappiness over overcrowding, higher prices, and social integration issues.

Yet, unlike Japan, which has the world's oldest population, Singapore has not refrained from tapping immigrants to make up the labour shortfall. Japan seems unlikely to change mindsets to embrace diversity that immigration brings, and abandon exclusionary notions of ethnic homogeneity - at least not by 2050, when it will have lost a third of its 127 million population.

Tough choices await Japan, Singapore and other countries. If a silver glimmer is to appear as the world swiftly ages, a change in public attitudes will be critical.

School with terrorist links

Indonesian school with terrorist links

Zubaidah Nazeer
The Straits Times
Publication Date : 13-10-2012

The school in this city's notorious Ngruki district seems normal enough at first glance. There is a computer lab near the entrance. Beyond it, some teenage boys play basketball. In another wing, a group of girls wave hello and giggle shyly.

On closer inspection, though, there are some unsettling differences at Pondok Pesantren Islam Al Mukmin. There are no portraits of the President and Vice-President, usually found in schools. Also absent are the national flag and Garuda Pancasila, which represents Indonesia's state ideology.

The missing elements are a throwback to the Islamic boarding school's past. It was founded by imprisoned terrorist leader Abu Bakar Bashir, whose portrait still hangs on the wall of the teachers' room today, and radical cleric Abdullah Sungkar, who died in 1999.

These firebrand clerics believed that Indonesia's national symbols and ideology had no place in their dream of turning the country into an Islamic state.

Some 40 years after its founding, the spotlight remains on this school for its connection to terrorist activities. In late August, police killed two former students when they tried to escape arrest for their role in terrorist cells. A few days before that, it emerged that three French nationals involved in the March bombing of the Indonesian embassy in Paris had planned to use the school as a hideout.

Analysts and the authorities have said the school is the focal point of a radical "Ngruki network", a term International Crisis Group coined in 2002 to describe Central Java members with ties to Al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah (JI). Amrozi and Mukhlas, two of the three men executed in 2008 for planning the 2002 Bali bombings, were once students here.

"We are immune to being accused, so we now open our school to anyone that wants to check," said senior teacher Ustaz Hamim Sofyan. "We have worked hard to correct misperceptions of being a terrorist hotbed."

On the surface, that may seem true. When The Straits Times first visited the school in 2002, students wore T-shirts bearing the face of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. They carved United States or Israel on their slippers to show their revulsion for those thought to be enemies of Islam.

Ten years on, such signs of extremism are gone. Lessons are taught in Indonesian, Arabic and English and subjects are heavy on Islamic scripture. But maths and science are taught too. Motivational phrases, not terror slogans, hang on walls. Some were handwritten by pupils. One reads: "Words cut more than swords."

The school, funded by donors from as far away as the Middle East, has a bigger compound than most. Indeed, it is one of the area's richest. Of its 1,400 students, girls outnumber boys slightly. Two of its four buildings house separate dormitories for boys and girls.

"If there are radical elements that choose to be here or our students are involved, we are sorry," said Hamim. "But we don't teach fanatical ideologies here."

National Counter-Terrorism Agency chief Ansyaad Mbai, however, told The Straits Times recently that he believes the school has a "secret curriculum" and says it is being monitored.

In a recent commentary, Islamic scholar Azyumardi Azra said that the curriculum used is approved by the Education and Religious Ministry and that there does not appear to be any deviation from mainstream thought.

"The problem is that the schooling process also includes a hidden curriculum, with a specific focus - that could include the ideology of using violence in the name of religion - delivered by some teachers or religious teachers," he said.

Sofwan Faisal Sifyan, a peace activist in Solo, said such ideologies are preached outside school hours. "Previous preachers were known to advocate violent views during the pengajian (religious study) and dakwah (proselytisation) sessions outside the school curriculum," he said.

Abu Bakar Bashir, who introduced teachings at the school based on Middle-Eastern sources, had been known to invite radicals to meet him there.

One 33-year-old who admits to being part of a militant network in Solo said literature there still emphasises the same tenets used by JI to legitimise taking up arms to establish an Islamic state.

In the past, teachers even chose students to join radical groups and for paramilitary training in Indonesia and Afghanistan.

But since the first Bali bomb blasts in 2002, radical teachers have been cleaned out. Mr Hamim said police and ministry officials conduct regular checks on the school's programmes. Police officers even send their children to school there, he claimed.

Madam Siti Nurlaila, 37, a shopkeeper who lives near the school, said Al Mukmin has a reputation for having the best teachers. She has attended classes there. She said: "The teachers are fiery and often tell us about the treatment of Muslims like in Palestine but I didn't think anything was radical about that."

Noor Huda Ismail, one of its most prominent graduates, worked for The Washington Post for some years before returning to Indonesia and is now engaged in anti-terrorism programmes through his Institute for International Peace Building in Jakarta. He wrote the book My Friend, The Terrorist, based on his personal account of the boarding school in 1991 and his friendship with Utomo Pamungkas, also known as Mubarok. The latter is serving a life sentence for his involvement in the 2002 Bali blasts.

"There were teachers whose preachings are hardline," he told The Straits Times. "Some students were influenced to think that those in the West were infidels, and were selected for training in Afghanistan. But the school has now cleaned up and is a far cry from what it used to be under Abu Bakar Bashir."

In an interview with this newspaper, Pondok Al Mukmin's principal Ustaz Wahyuddin also said the school is not the hotbed of terrorism it is made out to be.

"We feel disappointed that we've often been made the scapegoat school responsible for churning out terrorists," he said. "Only a handful of our alumni, who number in the tens of thousands, are suspected of such acts."

Fewer foreigners in Singapore Varisities

'Fewer foreigners' in S'pore varsities

The Straits Times
Monday, Oct 15, 2012

SYDNEY - Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong disclosed yesterday that the pool of foreign students in Singapore's universities has shrunk.

They now form just 16 per cent of enrolment, compared with 18 per cent last year,a decline that is in line with the Government's promise to cut the foreign student population to 15 per cent by 2015.

Mr Lee, who is on a five-day visit to Australia, made the disclosure to businessmen in Sydney when asked whether Singapore aimed to become a hub for overseas students.

But whileSingapore wants to be a centre for tertiary studies attracting good foreign students, it also wants to ensure its universities remained essentially Singaporean, he said.

"We would like Singapore to be a vibrant centre where there are lots of outstanding education institutions, something like Boston, or perhaps Sydney," he said.

It would allow "Singaporeans to pursue their tertiary education" alongside "a diverse and distinguished group of students from around the region and around the world".

The latter group tends to "bring with them their backgrounds, their experiences, their different cultures and enhance the experience for Singaporeans and for each other", Mr Lee said.

But a balance had to be struck between the desire to foster diversity and quality, and the need "to keep the Singapore character of the institutions", he said.

Hence, his pledge last year to gradually curtail the proportion of foreign students at local universities by giving all the 2,000 places to be created by 2015 to Singaporeans.

Mr Lee was speaking at a lunch event hosted in his honour by the Asia Society Australia in Sydney.

About 200 Australian businessmen attended, as did New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell, with whom he held brief discussions just before the lunch.

One topic they discussed was casinos, as Sydney is debating whether to allow a second one to be built after The Star, which has been in operation since 1995.

Quizzed later at the lunch event, Mr Lee stressed that he did not want to get involved in Sydney's debate, but was willing to share Singapore's experience.

He said Singapore allowed two integrated resorts from the start, not one, because "having crossed the Rubicon" in deciding to have casinos, it no longer was a matter of principle, and two made more business sense than one.

The casinos, he said, have been successful from the perspective of business and government revenue, as well as urban planning, because the Marina Bay Sands resort "has done a lot" for the Singapore skyline.

But the Government is "watching anxiously" the social effects.

Hence, his pledge last year to gradually curtail the proportion of foreign students at local universities by giving all the 2,000 places to be created by 2015 to Singaporeans.

Mr Lee was speaking at a lunch event hosted in his honour by the Asia Society Australia in Sydney.

About 200 Australian businessmen attended, as did New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell, with whom he held brief discussions just before the lunch.

One topic they discussed was casinos, as Sydney is debating whether to allow a second one to be built after The Star, which has been in operation since 1995.

Quizzed later at the lunch event, Mr Lee stressed that he did not want to get involved in Sydney's debate, but was willing to share Singapore's experience.

He said Singapore allowed two integrated resorts from the start, not one, because "having crossed the Rubicon" in deciding to have casinos, it no longer was a matter of principle, and two made more business sense than one.

The casinos, he said, have been successful from the perspective of business and government revenue, as well as urban planning, because the Marina Bay Sands resort "has done a lot" for the Singapore skyline.

But the Government is "watching anxiously" the social effects.

A population to sustain a home and global city

A population to sustain a home and global city

Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean addressed a range of population issues at a dialogue with 220 people on Tuesday night. The event was one of several held to consult the public, as the Government prepares to issue a White Paper on a sustainable population strategy in January. Here are excerpts of Mr Teo's speech.
The Straits Times, 12 Oct 2012

AS AT end June this year, there were 3.29 million Singapore citizens. But this is a static view. What's more important are the longer-term trends. Our fertility rate has been falling steadily over the years and was only 1.2 last year, quite a long way from the 2.1 that is required to replace ourselves.

With a TFR (total fertility rate) of 1.2, it means that for every 100 Singaporeans in this generation, there will be only 60 Singaporeans in the next generation. And in the generation after that, there will be only 36 Singaporeans. These 36 people will have to eventually support the 60 people from the previous generation, and many of the 100 people from the generation before that, because we are all living to a riper, older age.

If our birth rates stay at 1.20, and if we do not have immigration, our citizen population will start to decline from 2025. Our workforce of Singapore citizens will start to decline even earlier, from 2020, which is just seven years from now.

Marriage and parenthood

OUR first priority is to build as strong a Singaporean core as we possibly can by encouraging more Singaporeans to get married and have more children, and at an earlier age.

There are some positive signs. Our surveys show that 85 per cent of singles want to get married and eight in 10 married couples want to have two to three children.

We want to do our best to create an environment that supports Singaporeans to fulfil this desire. In fact, since 1987, we have encouraged Singaporeans to have three, or more, children.

Since 2001, we have redoubled our efforts, and put in place a comprehensive Marriage and Parenthood Package. These measures were enhanced again in 2004 and 2008, and again we are currently studying further enhancements.

We will strive to create a supportive and conducive environment for raising children, and we hope that couples will make the decision to start a family, even if circumstances do not quite fit their expectations completely or perfectly.

With all of us doing our part, I hope our birth rate can increase to at least 1.4 or 1.5. It was not so long ago that our birth rate was around 1.4 to 1.5, in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

Of course, it would be very good if our birth rate was higher than 1.5, but I think it will take time to change this, and we will need a huge effort from everyone. I hope that one day we will get there.

Immigration

EVEN though we have been encouraging more Singaporeans to marry and have children, we have actually been falling short of the numbers to replace ourselves. We need approximately an additional 20,000 new Singaporeans per year, to keep our citizen population stable.

Who are these new Singaporeans? A good number are spouses of Singaporeans. This is not surprising, given that nearly 40 per cent of marriages last year, or about 9,000 of the 22,000 marriages, were between a Singaporean and a non-Singaporean.

Most of the other new citizens are adults in their prime working years and their families, and we select those who are able to contribute to Singapore, and can integrate into our society.

So, with 20,000 new citizens per year, what we are essentially doing is trying to "fill" this shortfall.

Today, our population structure looks like a barrel. And if we project forward without immigration, in 2050, in 40 years' time, we will become an inverted triangle - with many more older people above the age of 50 and very much fewer young Singaporeans.

And so what is it that we are trying to do with immigration? It is to fill in those parts in the younger age groups so that our population structure will look more like a cylinder or a rectangle. What we are trying to do is to have a more stable and sustainable population.

We also have 530,000 permanent residents (PRs) today. These are people who we assess can make a long-term contribution to Singapore, but either they are not yet ready themselves to become Singapore citizens, or we are not yet ready to have them become Singapore citizens.

We have been taking in about 30,000 PRs per year in the last two years, compared to about twice that number in the four to five years prior to that. So our permanent resident numbers have, in fact, stabilised, and in the last two years the numbers have decreased very slightly.

Non-resident population

WHAT about our non-resident population? We have about 1.5 million non-residents in total, and this is the composition.
There are 220,000 dependants of citizens. These are spouses of Singaporeans, children of Singaporeans, and some of our higher-end Work Pass holders.

We also have international students, where the numbers have come down from about 100,000 in 2008 to about 84,000 in July this year.

We also have foreign domestic workers - about 210,000 of them. We have about 680,000 Work Permit holders. Most of them are doing work which either Singaporeans are not keen to do, or where there are not enough Singaporeans to do; 280,000 are construction workers.

And then we have the PMETs - professional, managerial and executives who are Employment Pass holders. They number about 170,000. There are also about 130,000 associate professionals. This group has been growing quite quickly, and we are trying to see how we can manage this growth.

Creating jobs

SINGAPOREANS are highly aspirational. We want good jobs for ourselves and particularly for our children.

We need to bring in new growth areas and new exciting industrial sectors to create such jobs. Sometimes, you do not have enough Singaporeans to create enough of a critical mass in these new industries for a start.

One example is the biomedical science industry. Ten years ago, in 2001, one in five of the professional, managerial, executive positions in the biomedical sciences industry were held by locals. This proportion has now increased to one in three, and in a much larger sector too.

And in these last 10 years, 2,000 new PME jobs for locals were created in this sector. We could not have kick-started this sector without bringing in people to help create the critical mass to get the sector growing. Over time, the sector expands and provides more opportunities, as we train more Singaporeans to take up these jobs.

While Singapore is still an attractive business location, we do face competition from many emerging cities.

I co-chair the Singapore-China Joint Council for Bilateral Cooperation. When I visit some of the cities there, they are very exciting and vibrant. What they are looking for in terms of investments in jobs and industries is very often what we are looking for. Cities like Tianjin, Suzhou or Shanghai are moving very fast, and they are very hungry.

If we have a shrinking and ageing population, it will be much more difficult for us to bring in exciting new industries, to attract new investments. Singapore will become a much less dynamic and vibrant place, and our young people who want to work in such growth industries may then go off to Tianjin or Mumbai or elsewhere. That would make our population problem even worse.

Foreign manpower needs

UNLIKE our resident population of citizens and PRs for which we want long-term stability, our foreign workforce is a transient one. It can adjust, grow, or shrink according to our needs. This gives us a lot of flexibility, and is one reason why we have been able to maintain relatively low unemployment through the economic cycles.

But we cannot grow our foreign workforce indefinitely. In fact, we have already started to tighten the access to foreign workers to slow down the growth of the foreign workforce.

In the first six months of this year, the growth in foreign manpower (excluding foreign domestic workers) slowed to 34,100, compared to 36,800 in the first half of last year.

Fifteen thousand of the growth for the first half of this year has been in construction. This is three times the growth in the first half of last year. We need construction workers to build HDB homes and MRT lines.

The other sectors would have seen the growth in total foreign workforce slow down quite seriously - from 31,000 to 18,600.

We already know from surveys that eight in 10 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are facing manpower shortages, and three in 10 are looking to relocate overseas to stay viable.

Now this is a serious matter because our SMEs employ 70 per cent of our workforce, and we have to be mindful that many of the SME workers are Singaporeans too. These Singaporeans will lose their jobs if our SMEs move abroad or close down. So we have to make these adjustments in a calibrated way to make sure the huge efforts we are putting into productivity can have the time to take place.

We also live in an increasingly volatile world. In the last 15 years we have seen five down-cycles - the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, Sept 11, 2001, Sars in 2003, the Lehman crisis in 2007-2008, and now the euro zone crisis.

In those years when growth is strong, we should seize the opportunities that come our way. In such times, we may allow more foreign workers to come in to supplement our workforce. Such periods will help make up for years of slow or even negative growth.

But I think the overall growth target of 3 to 5 per cent annual growth set out by the Economic Strategies Committee up to 2020 is a reasonable growth rate, if we can even achieve that.

How many people can we have in Singapore?

MANY people have also asked: "We are so crowded already - how many people can we take on our small island?"

Singapore feels crowded today because population growth surged ahead of our infrastructure, transport and housing as our economy rebounded rapidly in the last few years. We have been working hard to catch up - which also explains the increase in construction workers for now.

How many people we can have in Singapore depends on many factors, including how well we plan our urban environment as well as the technology solutions that will be available to us. If you look at Pinnacle@Duxton, many people want to live there, even though the population density is very high, because it is convenient and the environment is nice, with amenities close by.

URA (Urban Redevelopment Authority), in their most recent mid-term concept plan review in 2006, assessed that Singapore has sufficient land to support a population of 6.5 million. Several experts have commented that there is room for growth beyond that number, and we are going to seriously study this, because that is the responsible thing to do.

Let me stress that these are planning parameters and not a population target. It does not mean that Singapore will go for a population of that size. The problem is that without proper planning, there will be crowding leading to a poorer living environment. So it is better to plan early, so that Singapore can continue to be developed in a well-planned way with good living environment.

Singapore: Our Home, A Global City

ONE of the big concerns we have heard is: "Will I feel like a stranger in Singapore?"

Singapore has always been an immigrant society. If you look back to the roots of your own family, you do not have to go back very far to find somebody who came to Singapore from elsewhere and decided to sink roots here. Our diversity has been a huge strength for Singapore, but also meant that we need to put in additional effort to build national cohesion. Because of this diversity, Singaporeans understand the region better than most.

We have an understanding and experience of different cultures, languages and people. This is a strength for Singaporeans. We can be quite comfortable living anywhere in the world. And this ability to transit from culture to culture will be a key attribute for any exciting, growing city in the future.

The structure of our population has also been evolving. We now have more Singaporeans living and working overseas, even as we have more foreigners living and working in Singapore. More Singaporeans are marrying foreigners - making up 40 per cent of marriages. More Singaporean children will have fathers or mothers who were not born in Singapore.

We are united, not by where we are born, but by the values we live by and a common desire to want to make Singapore, our home, better.

Two Senior JI Members Detained 12 Oct 2012

Two senior JI members detained

Home Affairs Ministry says the men were involved in scouting potential targets for terror hit
by Amir Hussain
04:45 AM Oct 12, 2012


SINGAPORE - Two senior members of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorist organisation, who had scouted targets for a terrorist attack here, have been detained under the Internal Security Act.

Their detention was announced by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) yesterday, a day before the 10th anniversary of the Bali bombings.

The duo, Abd Rahim Abdul Rahman and Husaini Ismail, fled Singapore in December 2001 after security operations to nab organisation members began.

The men, who had undergone training in Afghanistan with the Al Qaeda terrorist organisation between 1999 and 2000, were detained under the Internal Security Act (ISA) in March and June, respectively.

In its statement, MHA said the men had been "actively involved in reconnoitring several potential local and foreign targets in Singapore for the purpose of a terrorist attack".

Husaini was involved in the plot, led by Singapore JI leader Mas Selamat Kastari, to hijack an aircraft and crash it into Changi Airport in January 2002 in retaliation for the authorities' disruption of the local JI network.

Abd Rahim was arrested in Malaysia in February this year and deported to Singapore, while Husaini was arrested in Indonesia in June 2009 for immigration offences and deported to Singapore after completing his jail term there in May.

The MHA said two other JI members, Rijal Yahdri Jumari and Mohd Jauhari Adbullah, and a self-radicalised individual, Muhammad Fadil Abdul Hamid, were released from detention and put on Restriction Orders between March and September this year.

Rijal was a member of the JI's "Al Ghuraba" cell in Pakistan, which groomed young JI members to be operatives and future JI leaders. He was detained under the ISA in March 2008. Jauhari was a senior JI member who was detained in September 2002, in the second phase of JI arrests here, while Fadil was a self-radicalised youth who was detained in April 2010.

Fadil, who was a full-time national serviceman when he was arrested, wanted to "wage armed jihad in Afghanistan and die as a matyr on the battlefield", the MHA statement said.

Restriction Orders against 18 individuals - one Moro Islamic Liberation Front member and 17 JI members - were allowed to lapse, added the MHA yesterday.

Associate Professor Kumar Ramakrishna, Head of the Centre of Excellence for National Security at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), said the security sweeps in late 2001 and 2002 had "essentially decimated the main JI threat to Singapore".

Still, he cautioned: "JI will never be finished as long as the extremist ideology that sustains extremist networks like JI continues to be in circulation."

Meanwhile, Professor Rohan Gunaratna, Head of the RSIS' International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, felt that "terrorism remains the tier one national security threat to Singapore".

"Regionally, the terrorist and the extremist threat has not declined; (terrorism) remains a significant threat to the region ... There are many terrorist groups active in Indonesia, and still pose a threat to Singapore", Prof Gunaratna said.

Both analysts also cautioned against the threat of self-radicalisation taking root here. "If you do not do enough to diminish the underlying conditions that give rise to the extremist networks in the first place, you will always have the physical threat. So you need to approach the problem at two levels - the physical level and, very importantly, the ideological level," said Assoc Prof Kuma

Justice Still

The man behind the Supertrees British landscape architect Andrew Grant, lead designer of Gardens By The Bay South, tells Senior Writer Cheong Suk-Wai that those Supertrees serve a practical function too: of letting off hot air. The Straits Times, 6 Oct 2012

The man behind the Supertrees

British landscape architect Andrew Grant, lead designer of Gardens By The Bay South, tells Senior Writer Cheong Suk-Wai that those Supertrees serve a practical function too: of letting off hot air.

The Straits Times, 6 Oct 2012

THE enchanted forest that is Gardens By The Bay South may seem the fruit of fevered imaginings, with its towering Supertrees, clamshell-like conservatories and rainbow gardens.

Indeed, landscape architect Andrew Grant, the gardens' master planner and lead designer, drew inspiration from the magical jungles in the Japanese animated film Princess Mononoke for Singapore's $1 billion newest public park.

But that spectacle was underpinned by his insistence that the Gardens should be, above all, a model ecosystem too.

Mr Grant, 54, founder of the eponymous Grant Associates, recalled: "Right at the beginning, I did sketches to show how the energy cycles in the gardens should relate with its water cycles and rainfall patterns. My challenge to my design team was for them to find efficient and environmentally friendly relationships between the gardens' buildings and its landscape."

He is a farm boy at heart, who grew up "in tune with the seasons". At his father's farm in the village of Roos in East Yorkshire, he fed the family pigs, harvested corn and packed sacks with just-dug potatoes. The instinct to protect, not harm, natural surroundings is ingrained in him.

Mr Grant, married with two young daughters, has never owned a car. It helps that he lives in Bath, the historic south-western British city where everything from the train station to the theatre is within walking distance.

He says he was deeply influenced by a fellow landscape architect, the late Geoffrey Jellicoe. In 1994, Mr Jellicoe told him that since the job of landscape architects was to "make marks" on the environment, whether in Stonehenge or in the city, it was better to make sure those marks healed, not harmed, the Earth.

Mr Grant's belief in that led to the biggest bump in the road for the gardens' design team: how to cool two giant glasshouses without using energy-guzzling air-conditioners?

The solution from his team-mates at Wilkinson Eyre Architects was simple yet daring: Burn the tonnes of grass clippings and wood waste from all over Singapore for heat to power turbines that would in turn chill underground water pipes to cool the conservatories from the floor up.

That innovation has won Mr Grant's team global renown. Yesterday, the conservatories were collectively named the World Building of the Year, which is the top prize at the prestigious World Architecture Festival (WAF), held here this year.

There was a portent of their victory on Thursday, when Wilkinson Eyre took home the WAF Display award for the conservatories.

Grant Associates was also up for best completed urban landscape project, but lost to Germany's Atelier Dreiseitl, which scored for another Singapore project, the Kallang River Bishan Park.

As lead designer, Mr Grant parcelled out the work on the gardens, from Supertrees to conservatories, to the various partnering firms.

A senior landscape architect was put in charge of each parcel while Mr Grant then "guided, cajoled and made sure they worked to my masterplan", along with his Grant Associates colleague, Mr Keith French.

Gardens By The Bay chief executive Tan Wee Kiat said of the team effort that helped turn Gardens by the Bay from a tropical garden concept dreamt up by the National Parks Board (NParks) to reality: "We had a unique working arrangement that entailed housing the consultants spearheaded by Grant Associates, the entirely local team of contractors, the government agency partners in the project and the entire Gardens by the Bay staff under one roof."

The design vision for Gardens by the Bay South began in 2006, when Grant Associates beat 75 others in the international design competition NParks held for the gardens' masterplan. Before clinching that contract, the 32-person firm's projects were mainly within Britain.

So Mr Grant considered the 54ha gardens on reclaimed land a "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity, because of its sheer scale and complexity. He recalled: "We were all struck by Singapore's vision, which is all about thinking ahead. I mean, to actually have faith in making a statement like 'We're going to put this huge park in the centre of this prime place and this is what Singapore is going to be about' is very bold and visionary."

He began by doing little sketches of Singapore icons such as the Merlion and Changi Airport before settling on the national flower, the orchid, as the layout template for the gardens.

"We thought through how the orchid's stems became the network of pathways, growing into the city, how its blooms would be the special gardens and how its leaves would be the project's infrastructure, like roads and drains."

To enhance visitors' sense of awe, he took a leaf from southwestern Australia's Valley of the Giants, in which grow trees of varying heights, from the 20m-high eucalyptus to Karri trees that each shoot up to 70m. From that, he decided to create a cluster of Supertrees "that were tree-like but did not copy trees", which doubled up as vertical gardens shooting up to 50m skywards, made of steel and concrete.

Some critics pan the Supertrees as complicated, unnecessary structures that are mere steel copies of real trees. Why not just plant giant tropical trees, the way the domed conservatories transplanted huge baobab trees from Africa to Marina Bay?

He pointed out that his team had already done so by creating the Fragile Forest, which has young rainforest trees that would grow to great heights in time.

In fact, the Supertrees also serve a practical function: as concrete chimneys. The burning of waste material to cool the conservatories generates a lot of smoke. This smoke is treated to remove particles and then deplumed to suck the ash out of the air.

The result is purified hot air which is then released into the atmosphere via chimneys hidden in the Supertrees.

Some have also wondered if Mr Grant took inspiration from the tree-like structures in Clarke Quay, the brainchild of another British architect, Mr Stephen Pimbley of British firm Alsop Architects. Mr Pimbley's sprouting structures form a giant canopy over Clarke Quay's common areas, and look like transparent lilypads viewed from under water.

Mr Grant laughed good-naturedly, then stressed that that was not the case, although both projects shared the same structural engineer.

Some of his ideas may have drawn brickbats in the global design world, but Mr Grant says it was remarkable that NParks and other agencies involved supported the unusual design vision. There were no naysayers.

Instead, he found Singapore's whole-of-government approach an education in best practices.

NParks saw to all the plants for the gardens. His team worked closely with the Public Utilities Board on how to supply water efficiently to their ecosystem, and also with the Building and Construction Authority and CPG Corp (the former Public Works Department). These all worked together, producing integrated design, water, ecology, energy and value-for-money solutions.

The Singapore government's "sense of thinking ahead" impressed him deeply.

"In many other places," he mused, "they would build the buildings first and leave the parks for later. But Singapore is thinking of its future, how in this century can it create a better environment for all here."

He added, "What you get here is a very clear, direct link from the Government's policies which are very clearly expressed by your prime minister, which translate very quickly into projects and programmes.

"In Europe, and certainly in Britain, you will have those policies but they'd have to filter through a whole myriad of influences before they end up somewhere to be implemented."

He has opened Grant Associates' first overseas office here, manned by five colleagues. They are working on projects such as the mixed development of the Capitol Theatre site here, Kuala Lumpur's new financial hub the Tun Razak Exchange, and raising visitor arrivals to Malaysia's Endau-Rompin National Park.

Meanwhile, his work on the gardens goes on. He told The Straits Times that the gardens will soon get a second bridge linking its Meadow to the Bayfront MRT station, as well as a 9m-long bronze sculpture of a baby titled Planets, by British artist Marc Quinn.

Best of all and "incredibly satisfying", he said, is this: "Seeing so many people go, 'Wow! Wow! Wow!' with smiles on their faces at all hours of the day... it's the most rewarding thing."