Category: information

9 Years: Unacceptable

October 28, 2009 by Taran Rampersad

When I got an email this morning with the title of 'Unacceptable' from Raul Bermudez, through the main computing email list of Trinidad and Tobago, I wondered what it could be this time. There are plenty of things that I believe should be considered unacceptable in Trinidad and Tobago. Rather than list those, I'll get to the meat of the email.

The content of the email was a simple link to Andy Johnson's article, Standard of living 'generally acceptable'.

I read. It's about information that has just been released from the 2000 census. 2000. A primary school student would be able to surmise that the information is 9 years old, but that isn't Andy's fault. 9 years. And there are many people who I know that claim that no one approached them about the census, so there is a question of how thorough the census actually has been.

But it took them 9 years to release the information. 9 years. Likely, the report has only now been released - and that means for the last 9 years, the government has been doing planning for infrastructure and the future without data to substantiate it. And those plans have been enacted in the form of annual budgets that make as much sense as the lack of hard data behind them.  {Read more}