Born with brittle bone disease, he fractured his right leg more than five times in primary school.

Since then, Mr Mohamed Najulah has used a wheelchair for his own safety.

“In the hospital, my mum would tell me in tears that everything will soon go back to normal and these were but small obstacles I could overcome,” the Singapore Polytechnic (SP) student, 21, told The New Paper.

These experiences would later help him develop an award-winning web-based app called Happy Wheel.

Mr Najulah joined SP as part of its pioneer Polytechnic Foundation Programme (PFP) in 2013. He studied business information technology and will graduate in May with more than 800 other PFP students.

The idea for the app came after he went for a talk at the Microsoft building at Marina Boulevard and realised his route there from the MRT station was full of barriers and steps.

He started developing Happy Wheel at his first hackathon, the Transport and You(th) Hackathon in April 2015. The app taps on publicly available data sets and Google to suggest wheelchair-friendly paths. It also allows users to share convenient paths for other wheelchair users.

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Happy Wheel won the People’s Choice award at the hackathon and was even highlighted on Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s Facebook page after he attended the event.

Mr Najulah said: “I was so nervous meeting him… and was honoured that he featured it.”

He is still working on the app with seven coursemates.

The PFP is a through-train programme introduced by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the polys in 2013 for top performing Normal (Academic) students, said Ms Chao Yunn Chyi, director of SP’s School of Mathematics & Science, which coordinates SP’s PFP.

Students enrolled in the PFP will skip their fifth year in secondary school and move directly into poly.

Upon completion of the PFP, they will start on their full-time diploma courses as other poly-bound students.

MOE data shows that across the polys, 99.5 per cent of the pioneer PFP batch made it to their diploma course.

Mr Najulah has just finished an internship at A*STAR’s Institute of High Performance Computing where he assisted in research to create barrier-free access for wheelchair users.

He aspires to continue developing apps that will be useful to society, and advises other people with disabilities: “There is no challenge that is insurmountable, there will always be an alternative way out.

“You just need to find it.”

chualel@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on March 1, 2017.
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The water price hike was vigorously debated by Members of Parliament (MPs) yesterday, a little over a week after Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat had made the announcement in his Budget speech.

Mr Heng had announced that the price of water will go up by 30 per cent in two phases, starting from July 1, to pay for more costly methods of obtaining fresh water from sea water and to get people to save water.

This is the first time in 17 years that water tariffs will go up and on the first day of the Budget debate yesterday, Non-Constituency MP Dennis Tan said the increase has left many Singaporeans and businesses extremely nervous.

Calling it “a dramatic rise”, Mr Tan said the ones most affected will be industries that use a lot of water, such as the food and beverage sector.

Read also: Cost of supplying water has more than doubled: PUB
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He felt the sharp increase in water tariffs could have an adverse chain reaction – as a rise in such costs could lead to an increase in prices that would be passed on to consumers.

But Mr Henry Kwek (Nee Soon GRC) said that the U-Save rebates will lessen the impact of the water hike.

Those living in one- or two-room HDB flats, for example, will end up spending a dollar less on their monthly water bills on average after the rebates are applied.

Those in four-room flats will see their bills rise by about $5 from the current average of $42 after rebates.

Mr Kwek said that hawker stalls he visited will see about a $30 increase in costs a month – an amount that was unlikely to translate to an increase in living costs.

Aljunied GRC MP Pritam Singh called for the Government to clarify how the Public Utilities Board (PUB) prices water to help the public better understand the hike.

He suggested the Government look at alternative policies, such as the tightening of regulations on sanitary appliances such as mixers and shower heads that use excessive water, to promote the use of water-saving appliances.

Mr Liang Eng Hwa (Holland-Bukit Timah GRC) suggested industry players get together and work with PUB and A*Star (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) and come up with long-term solutions.

Mountbatten MP Lim Biow Chuan backed the hike, agreeing with Mr Heng that water is critical to Singapore’s survival, adding that there is never a good time to raise prices.

He felt the 30 per cent water hike may have distracted many from the main focus of this year’s Budget – which is to plan for the country’s future.

Mr Heng will respond tomorrow, after which Parliament will form the Committee of Supply to debate the budgets of the respective ministries.

rloh@sph.com.sg

Read also: Twitter users share how to save water after Budget 2017’s announcement of water price hike
Budget 2017’s water price hike: What you’re not hearing about the 30 per cent increase

This article was first published on March 1, 2017.
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In a stacking ring toy used to develop a child’s fine motor skills, the biggest ring goes in first to form a sturdy base.

That base is what the Early Childhood Development Centres (ECDC) Bill hopes to be for the early childhood sector, said Minister of Social and Family Development Tan Chuan-Jin.

“The ECDC Bill seeks exactly to be that strong and reliable base for the sector – to consistently provide good quality programmes that give our young parents peace of mind when it comes to the safety, well-being and development of their children,” he told Parliament yesterday to kick off the debate.

The Bill was passed yesterday and the law will come into effect over the next year.

It will cover private childcare centres and kindergartens, which now come under the Child Care Centres Act, but exclude those run by the Ministry of Education (MOE), which are governed by the Education Act.

Three key provisions were introduced in the Bill:

• Childcare centres and kindergartens have to renew their licences regularly. Childcare centres already do this while kindergartens are registered through a one-off process. The maximum tenure will be extended to three years, up from the current two. Pre-schools with at least two consecutive two-year licences will be given a three-year licence.
• On top of entering and inspecting pre-schools and taking documents from them, Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) officers will get more investigative powers to interview people, and take photos, videos or audio recordings at pre-schools.
• The penalty framework will now have a wider range of regulatory sanctions to make sure the penalty is proportionate to the breach. The new law carries a maximum penalty of a $10,000 fine and a year’s jail.

The current Child Care Centres Act carries a maximum of $5,000 fine and two years’ jail while the Education Act has a maximum $2,000 fine and a year’s jail.

While MPs supported the Bill, some were concerned with potential fee rises.

Mr Tan said the new law is unlikely to, and should not, lead to higher fees as the regulatory framework has been carefully calibrated to raise the quality of programmes without unnecessarily raising costs.

He said the two main cost drivers for pre-schools are rental expenses and teachers’ salaries.

Some MPs also raised concerns about MOE kindergartens staying under the Education Act instead of coming under the new law, with Nee Soon MP Lee Bee Wah asking if it was a case of double standards.

Mr Tan said that prior to ECDA, the early childhood space was left to the market. MOE later stepped in with MSF to develop a curriculum and standards for the sector.

“MOE is not a fringe player that’s coming in or one of those establishments that has no background. They are intimately involved in the process from day one. And MOE, I think, will fulfil ECDA’s requirements along with the rest of the industry,” he said.

Manager Alan Cheng, 34, who has a three-year-old girl, told The New Paper: “As my wife and I work, we have no choice but to put our girl in a childcare centre.

“Knowing that everyone who works there, from cleaners to third-party vendors, will have to be approved by ECDA for their suitability gives us peace of mind.”

fjieying@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on March 1, 2017.
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LONDON – A crowdfunding campaign for legal fees to help a Singaporean grandmother deported from Britain for breaching immigration rules had raised more than £46,000 (S$80,000) by Tuesday (Feb 28).

Irene Clennell, who first arrived in Britain in 1988 and is married to a British man, was deported to Singapore on Sunday despite a high-profile campaign for her to stay on compassionate grounds.

Her sister-in-law, Angela Clennell, set up the crowdfunding campaign, saying that her brother was seriously ill and Irene was his “sole caretaker”.

“Irene has nowhere to go in Singapore, both her parents have passed away – her whole life is here in Britain,” Clennell said on the website gofundme.com.

“As you can imagine it was a great shock receiving the phone call from Irene at 11am to inform us she was being deported at 3.30” on Sunday, she said.

Clennell is staying with her sister in Singapore.

She and her husband John have two children and a two-year-old granddaughter.

She spent periods of time in Singapore to care for her parents before they died and lost her leave to remain as a result of Britain’s spousal visa system.

The controversial system means that the British partner in a marriage has to prove earnings of at least £18,600 and the couple have to demonstrate long stretches of uninterrupted time living in Britain.

The threshold was put in place in 2012 as part of efforts to drive down the number of immigrants arriving in Britain from outside the European Union.

“All applications for leave to remain in the UK are considered on their individual merits and in line with immigration rules,” a Home Office spokesman said.

“We expect those with no legal right to remain in the country to leave,” he said.

A district judge was scathing in his remarks on SMRT Trains after imposing a record $400,000 fine yesterday on the company over an accident last year in which two trainees died.

Meting out the deterrent fine, District Judge Chay Yuen Fatt found that SMRT’s culpability was high and that the “failures were fundamental and serious”.

What the employees were doing on the day in question was highly dangerous, he said.

He said that while it was revealed that there were operating procedures in existence, they, sadly, were “not worth the paper on which these were printed, if they were printed at all”.

Read also: MOM, LTA issue interim safety instructions to SMRT in wake of fatal accident
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SMRT had pleaded guilty yesterday to one charge under the Workplace Safety and Health Act for failing to take measures necessary to ensure the safety and health of its employees who had to access the train tracks during traffic hours.

On March 22 last year, two trainees died when a train hit them shortly after they stepped onto the tracks, in SMRT’s worst fatal rail incident.

Mr Nasrulhudin Najumudin, 26, and Mr Muhammad Asyraf Ahmad Buhari, 24, were part of a 15-member team sent to check on an apparent fault when they were hit by the train near Pasir Ris MRT station.

In his remarks, the judge noted the scale of the lapses and SMRT’s ignorance of its staff’s practices.

He said: “It was also highly disconcerting and aggravating that the failures were systemic and had occurred on many levels, and that, at the very least, SMRT ought to have known of these failures, even if it did not in fact know of them.”

He went into further details on the operating procedures and said that not only were these not followed, but a completely different and clearly unsafe set of practices had been adopted for a long time by SMRT employees.The practices appeared to have evolved in a haphazard fashion to suit the convenience of the employees. These were neither documented nor disseminated. The official safety protocols were either unknown or completely disregarded.

The judge also found that the potential for harm was high.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Anandan Bala said this was not a one-off incident.

As early as 2002, the Operations Control Centre, which is in charge of granting permission for and supervising track access, had been approving requests that did not comply with the operating procedures.

This was SMRT’s third transgression of workplace safety within a short span of 5½ years, he said.

In mitigation, SMRT’s lawyers, Senior Counsel Andre Maniam and Ms Jenny Tsin, said the company has reviewed and tightened its operating procedures.

Mr Maniam said his client failed to detect that the employees had deviated from the operating procedures to minimise disruption of train services, albeit while maintaining adequate safety standards.

He said: “These deviations were never documented, approved or authorised by SMRT for the simple reason that SMRT did not know of them.”

Both trainees’ families declined comment when contacted. The company could have been fined up to $500,000.

elena@sph.com.sg

Read also:
SMRT accident: Witnesses living near train station recount heart-stopping moments before tragedy
SMRT deaths: 2 killed were among 15 staff on walkway

This article was first published on March 1, 2017.
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Dynamic fares based on demand will apply to those using Grab ride-hailing app

Some taxi fares could soon fluctuate according to actual demand for cabs.

Two taxi operators are planning to implement dynamic fares, popularly known as surge pricing, with a third looking to join the fray.

Trans-Cab, Singapore’s second largest operator with 4,566 taxis, and Premier Taxi, the second smallest with 1,889 cabs, said they had informed the Public Transport Council (PTC) of their plans.

Prime, the smallest operator with 731 cabs, is considering implementing the controversial fare system too.

Though taxi fares are not regulated here, operators are required to keep the PTC posted of all changes before they are implemented. The operators are awaiting the PTC’s response.

The new fares will apply only to commuters hailing a cab via the Grab ride-hailing app.

ComfortDelGro and SMRT Taxis have not indicated that they want to join the initiative.

Dynamic fares vary according to real-time demand – lower than the current structured taxi fares during off-peak hours but possibly much costlier when demand surges.

During major rail breakdowns, commuters complained of Uber fares exceeding $140 – four to five times that of a usual taxi fare.

But supporters of dynamic fares point out that in cases of high demand, the supply of taxis under the current pricing plan is inadequate.

Premier Taxi managing director, Mr Lim Chong Boo, said: “During the peak, there would not be enough taxis even if we doubled the fleet.”

He said dynamic pricing “is a Grab initiative, and as a business partner, we are supporting it”.

The new format will give commuters another alternative to secure a cab, he added.

“It’ll also allow taxi drivers some levelling of the playing field,” said Mr Lim, referring to cabbies complaining they are losing business to private-hire drivers due to the rigid fare surcharge system taxis must adhere to.

Trans-Cab managing director, Mr Teo Kiang Ang, said he was keen to roll out dynamic pricing, “but the PTC asked us to hold on”.

Asked why the council’s approval had to be sought since taxi fares have been deregulated since 1998, a PTC spokesman would only say: “PTC and Land Transport Authority will jointly review the applications.”

Observers reckon the Government is waiting for market leader ComfortDelGro – which controls more than 60 per cent of taxis here – to make a move before making a decision.

Two weeks ago, ComfortDelGro’s chief executive of taxi business, Mr Yang Ban Seng, said: “We would love to do surge pricing, but I don’t think we are allowed to.”

Assistant Professor Yang Nan of the National University of Singapore Business School’s strategy and policy department said taxi firms may actually lose some competitive advantage as “people prefer conventional cabs because there is more certainty in their fares”.

“If everything is too similar, it will boil down to price competition. And the taxi companies do not have the advantage of these other players,” he said, adding that the latter “have deep pockets and money to burn, and they can press down fares”.

SIM University economist Walter Theseira said: “On the one hand, it is a good idea to have better responsiveness. But the risk is it will be next to impossible to get a street hail.

“This may be a transitional concern though. If people move entirely over to getting a taxi via an app, then it won’t be a concern any more.”

Grab would not comment when contacted yesterday.

This article was first published on March 1, 2017.
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