Sunday, July 15 2012

THE EDITOR: Recently, the TTMA hosted a discussion forum with new Trade and Industry Minister Vasant Bharath. After an excellent address by TTMA President Dominic Hadeed outlining most of the difficulties manufacturers and all business persons face in TT Minister Bharath took the podium.

A communicator par excellence Minister Bharath highlighted among other relevant statistics TT’s very low world ranking on the competitiveness and ease of doing business scales. He promised to address these issues with so much urgency that by 2015, he assured his audience, we will be in the top ten ranking of these two vital components of business success.

Now, I did not get a chance to say so but Minister Bharath will have to somehow engineer a total change in the culture of the public service if he is going to achieve these admirable objectives. We all know the story of Greece and Germany and our public service operates largely in the fantasy realm of the Greek public servant and not the German.

Changing their orientation will take a massive dose of clever persuasion and I wish Minister Bharath well in this noble objective. I would like to humbly suggest that he looks at engaging the services of actual business operators to talk to key groups of public servants to help them see the way to a more efficient tomorrow.



Gregory Wight

Diego Martin