I have never been a fan of the National Service and it pains me to see that part of my hard-earned money - through income tax - may be part of the RM500 million NS budget being squandered left, right and centre thanks to the numerous due botch ups which is now coming to be a Malaysian trademark.

To name a few, the NS programme is riddled with transport and meals letdowns, trainees' fear for their safety and this coupled with the amazing ability of those responsible to say everything is all right and the media is to be blamed for hyping it up. What a shameful state of affairs.

The issue of transport being not up to mark for the first and second batch of National Service trainees is very puzzling indeed. What struck me a as a bystander was that some of the bus companies mentioned to provide transport were alien or not known to many of us at all.

Is it possible that companies that are not experienced in transport were given the task, which proved beyond their capabilities? Is this an exercise to help out some retired general who has nothing else to do?

There are many other well-established companies such as TransNasional and Park May who probably would not have faced similar difficulties given their experience in running large transport companies.

If we cannot even mobilise trainees from one place to another efficiently and properly, can you imagine what would happen during a conflict?

Then we hear about food shortages and trainees not being given enough water and that they have to purchase them from the canteens. Come on, is National Service an exercise in nation building or wallet building?

Parents have also been greatly disturbed by reports of fighting between trainees, instructors beating up trainees and drugs being found and so on. If this is the training they are getting, then just leave them in their own hometowns where this sort of training can be obtained at a far lesser cost then what the taxpayer is paying now.

The icing on the cake was a report in the The Sun today quoting the National Service Training Council chairman Kol Prof Datuk Dr Ahmad Fawzi as saying that school dropouts may be excluded from future training.

Surely school dropouts must be a priority for the National Service programmes, as they are part of our nation too. There could be special programmes for them to cater for their education level and so one. Excluding them is not the answer.