Saturday, October 25, 2008

Reintroduction of Daylight Saving Time Confirms Mauritius Hasn't Got Its Priorities Right

Especially after you consider the government's dumb response when oil prices almost tripled from USD 50 to USD 147 a barrel over the last three years has been to make the purchase of bigger cars easier. Not making a sufficiently comfortable and reliable public transportation system available so that commuters would leave their cars at home is additional proof that we are suffering from a serious breakdown in leadership and management here.

It would also have been better for Ramgoolam to make good on his year-old chess-thumping promise of reviewing the abusive IPP contracts. Speaking about priorities, here is one more: we need to build another reservoir as quickly as possible or we run the risk of a repeat of 1999 when a serious drought halved our economic output. The latter risk, you would have noticed, is an entirely domestic issue: I guess you can call it an internal shock.
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4 comments:

  1. SR22 November, 2008 07:35

    Countries are only fooling themselves. And Dodoland, true to its "batte-batté" spirit, is nosediving yet again.

    In a recent study, Matthew J. Kotchen and Laura E. Grant from the University of California confirm that "daylight time costs Indiana households an average of $3.29 a year in higher electricity bills, or about $9 million for the whole state". They "calculated the health and other social costs of increased pollution emissions at $1.7 million to $5.5 million per year".

    They also pointed out that "Arizona, one of the hottest states, may have it right; it does not practice daylight time".

    Try to talk about getting things right to our heroes. Unless "vision" is about rationing water supply in anticipation of a future mismanagement, referred to as drought in that particular case!

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  2. akagugo09 June, 2010 17:01

    @ Samad Ramoly:
    It's strange how the concept of drought is perceived differently depending on where you are:
    In UK, a drought is officially declared after no rain is recorded over the country during 5 (five) consecutive days. The rationale behind this is that their water supply depends almost exclusively on drizzle (fine rain of very long duration) and an interruption in this has immediate consequences on the slow-moving ground-water and surface water levels.
    But in Mauritius, there is no official threshold-value/condition of drought condition. It is related - as you rightly mentionned - whenever the Authorities feel that stocks will not be replenished on time to cope with peaks in demand. Their foresight is as short as their memory of past events, and since Midlands Dam, no other major project for water storage has been implemented. Let alone major loss / leak detection and prevention...

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  3. SR10 June, 2010 11:17

    Glad to see more and more people getting candid about the "mismatches" that "miracle" wished to conceal forever!

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  4. Sanjay Jagatsingh16 November, 2014 22:38

    Studies confirm DST is a joke.

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