Parti Reformasi Insan Malaysia (Prim) wants Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi not to repeat the mistakes committed by previous premiers in past Malaysia Plans which had effectively marginalised poor Indians.

Its pro-tem secretary general P Uthayakumar today expressed hope that Abdullah will make true his statement that no race will be left out by the Ninth Malaysia Plan (9MP) by extending affirmative actions policies to poor Indians in the education and economic sectors.

"The Indian Malaysian poor have been left out for 49 years and in all of Malaysian's first to the eighth Malaysia Plans resulting in them obtaining 5.3 percent development while others attained as high as 12 percent," he said in a statement.

"The poor Indians are, in fact, in a worse off position as unlike the poor Orang Asli, Malays and others natives, the Indians do no have 'kampungs' (villages) or ancestral land as a safety net to fall back on in the event all else fails."

He also claimed that the community's lack of development has resulted social ills among poor Indians and that the problem will worsen if no effective actions are taken.

"Eighty percent of the Indian population end up becoming beggars, scavengers, criminals, gangsters, labourers, cleaners, sweepers and general workers," he said.

He added that a majority of orphans and inmates of old folks homes and prisons were Indians although the race formed less than eight percent of the country's population.

Proposals for Pak Lah

Uthayakumar said among the recommendations the premier should consider were:

  • to make kindergartens available in all Tamil primary schools;

  • to fully aid all Tamil schools;

  • to increase the allocation for Tamil schools as the RM24,780 allocated for each of the 525 Tamil schools for next year under the 9MP was insufficient to meet the needs of the 98,579 students;

  • to extend Public Services Department (PSD) scholarships to poor Indians for professional studies especially in medicine, engineering and ICT;

  • to not exclude poor Indians from poverty eradication and society restructuring programmes undertaken by government bodies such as Permodalan Nasional Berhad and Yayasan Amanah Hartanah Bumiputera;

  • to open micro credit facilities by Amanah Ikhtiar Malaysia to poor Indians;

  • to provide temples in all Indian community areas as 'their social fabric has been torn with the demolishment of temples in the past'.

    • Uthayakumar said Indians at the moment only had a 'token' number of opportunities under the 9MP.

    "There are merely only a token or a sprinkling of chances for them to start off with and nothing serious especially for the poor with per capita income of less than RM1,000 per month when the national per capita income is projected at RM17,741 in the 2006 budget," he said.