The opening of new small villages by the Orang Asli community will affect the government’s plans to develop infrastructure in their settlement areas.

Minister of Rural and Regional Development Ismail Sabri Yaakob said the Orang Asli community must immediately stop opening new villages so that the government’s efforts to provide complete infrastructure to all 853 Orang Asli villages throughout the country goes well.

“Right now, the government is focusing on providing complete infrastructure to 853 Orang Asli original villages and more than 80 percent already have electricity, water and roads. But we still find more than 100 new splinter villages which have been created.

“If they (Orang Asli) continue opening splinter villages, the problem of developing these villages will never end because we have to attend to the development in splinter villages first. Sometimes they open new villages in areas which are further away, on private land, and this slows down the development in the other original villages,” he said.

He was speaking to reporters after officiating a thanksgiving ceremony for Rural Electricity Supply Project at the Hulu Kemensah Orang Asli settlement in Hulu Klang today.

Also present were director-general of Orang Asli Development Department (Jakoa) Mohd Jamalludin Kasbi and senior general manager (corporate affairs) of Tenaga Nasional Berhad Mohd Aminuddin Mohd Amin.

In a separate development, Ismail said only 31,000 of the 136,000 hectares of land belonging to the Orang Asli have been gazetted so far due to the lack of cooperation from the community.

“By right, surveying works of the area by Jakoa should have been completed..but we are hampered because there are some Orang Asli who have been taken in by the lies of the opposition and have refused to let their lands be surveyed and demanded that the land to be gazetted be expanded, we are facing resistance from six Orang Asli villages.

He added that work to gazette the land in six villages will be postponed while that of the other villages will go ahead.

Meanwhile, village head Ebak Pulasan, 75, said the villagers who are of the Temuan tribe would no longer have to live in darkness which they endured for 15 years as they received electricity supply since early last year.

“I am very happy...we used to depend on candles and lamps at night. Now, the nights are bright and we are no longer in darkness,” he added.

-- Bernama