8. Indians - the Facts

By Syed Jaymal Zahiid in Malaysiakini

The Indian community in this country is ailing and no argument by any Barisan Nasional (BN) leader can rebut this fact, according to one researcher.

Monitoring Sustainability of Globalisation director and researcher Charles Santiago said the recent remark by a deputy minister that the Indians were doing better than the Malays, gave the wrong impression.

Deputy Rural and Regional Development Minister Zainal Abidin Osman told the Dewan Rakyat that the household income for Indians in 2004 was RM3,456, while it was RM2,711 for the 'Malays' and RM4,437 for the Chinese.

The spotlight fell on the Indian community following a mass rally on Nov 25 organised by the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf), which saw some 30,000 people taking to the streets amid allegations of marginalisation and ill treatment.

So are the Indians better off as claimed by Zainal Abidin?

"This is not true," stressed Santiago when met yesterday. "He must have acquired his facts from the Ninth Malaysian Plan (9MP) but I can tell you that Zainal's method of approaching the issue was incorrect."

Research showed that Zainal did acquire his facts from the 9MP in which the income per capita indicator had shown that the Indian household income was higher than the bumiputera.

However, Santiago noted that the key word here is the term 'bumiputera'.

He said the bumiputera category included non-Malay bumiputeras like the natives in Sabah and Sarawak and the Orang Asli.

This "weighted down the per capita income of the well-off Malay bumiputeras," he added. "Their (non-Malay bumiputera) income is one of the lowest in the country and of course if you categorise them as a single bumiputera ethnic group, the income index for the well-off Malay bumiputera will be lower than the Indians because the non-Malay bumiputera population is considerably high," he explained.

The 9MP's Employment by Occupation and Ethnic Group chart from 2000 to 2005 also shows that the Indians were economically the worst of the three major races in this country. ( See above chart ).

In 2005, for the low-wage labour sectors like plant, machine operators and assemblers, Indians constitute the highest number at 20.8 %, compared to bumiputeras (15.5 %) and Chinese (11.1 %).

Indians also dominate the lowest-paid non-production employment sector such as janitors and cleaners, with16.3 % compared to bumiputeras (9.9 %) and Chinese (8 %).

Another startling fact was that under the 9MP, a total of RM64 million had supposedly been allocated for 525 Tamil schools but only a total of RM2 million was given, which means that each school will only get a total of RM24,780 for a five-year period.

There are 148 Tamil schools which are fully aided while the remaining 396 are partially aided despite a Social Science Foundation's study showing that Tamil primary schools performed much better than national schools.

Apart from the schools issue, about 70,000 Indians born in this country do not have identity cards or birth certificates.

Set-up task force

Although Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi promised to elevate the status of Indians under the 9MP saying that they will be given a compulsory three percent equity ownership by 2010, Santiago fails to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

"No concrete mechanism to introduce this law was mentioned in the 9MP," he said.

"The 9MP has 599 pages but there is no mention about how the Indians are to enjoy the benefit of the compelling of businesses to give a three percent equity to them," he added.

If the government is serious in tackling Indian woes, Santiago said emphasis must be placed on education.

"Most of the Indians out there are unskilled and they cannot cope with a world that is ever demanding for more skilled workers.

"If education for the Indians remains as it is, how will they survive? This is the kind of situation that forces them to resort to crime," he added.

He suggested that the government set up a task force to be chaired by the prime minister himself to focus on measures to help tackle the 'Indian problem'.

"It must be Abdullah himself. No one else can solve this but the head of the policy makers," he added.