Monday, March 23, 2009

APOMM vs JPA Scholars


As a PSD scholar, I want to highlight the major issues of the PSD scholarship contract.

The first lies on the part of PSD for weak enforcement of contracts and allocation of public sector jobs. This is bad because we are spending billions of ringgit on PSD scholarships and yet we do not ensure that these quality human capital serves to improve and develop our country.

It used to be rigid when a PSD scholar will serve only under PSD. Things have changed recently when PSD scholarship contracts can be transferred to other Government agencies like the Securities Commission, Bank Negara Malaysia and public universities.

Yet, I wonder how many of these scholars will be allocated jobs in the public sector.

The second problem is on the part of the scholarship recipients. When the time comes to serve in the public sector, I see many praying and hoping that the Government will not enforce the PSD contracts and allocate jobs for them. There are some who are planning to break off the Government bond by repaying the whole sponsorship fund.

Right after the SPM examinations, there are about 13,000 applicants of the scholarship. Public funds are used to sponsor students to pursue a quality education overseas and return home to further improve or develop the Malaysian systems.

About RM400,000 is paid out for each non-medical scholarship. Most of these human capital sponsored by the Government will go down the drain because of the weak enforcement of contract by the Government.

I hope the PSD will ensure that they improve on the selection criteria and implement strict enforcement of contracts in future.

Our public funds must not be wasted at a critical moment when we are lacking in human capital as compared to Singapore, China and Britain.

GOH WEI LIANG,
Ipoh.

7 comments:

Jimmy Tham said...

aih~ deserving student like me are not given a scholarship and i'll have to slug it out every night just to make ends meet

Chiox said...

I dont' see a problem with PSD scholars being transferred to government agencies. After all they are still serving the government through these rergulators. They are not private firms after all, and in a way they are still serving the country.

And the fact that people hope that they do not get called back is probably human nature. People always want what they think is better. If you think that working in the government is better then you will naturally feel that these people are ungrateful. But if you do go and report but JPA can't find a job for you, it's not your problem. It's their problem.

Chiox said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Chiox said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Chiox said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Goh Wei Liang said...

I don't see any problems at all if they move on to other Government agencies.

I agree with any conditions, including the flexibility, as long as the public funds invested in scholarships to gain human capital for Malaysia are not wasted completely.

Also, I agree that JPA is at fault if they could not allocate jobs for the JPA scholars.

That is why in my article and letter to The Star, I criticised the scholarship recipients' attitude and also the weak enforcement of contracts on JPA's part.

Thank you for the comments and inputs.

Jimmy Tham said...

lol~

dear chiox,

there's this silly joke that I've been sharing with my friend wei liang here all the time. so let me share this with you now. =)

Many people wonder why government spent so much money on hiring new teachers and coming up wth incentives in getting them to serve the rural areas, what I'm thinking is, with all these great minds that JPA has in hand, wouldn't it be good to see those actuarists serving as teacher in rural areas like sabah and ssrawak? well~ they can shit claim gov cakap no kerja bagi kita so they will release us for sure, I say, kasi hantar you pigi interior jadi guru matematik sekolah menengah or pensyarah baru tahu.

I would like to blame it on the lack of coordination between the gov department, these are great people which Malaysia should try to retain as much as possible and not lose it to other countries.

on another hand, there's the issue with the award of scholarship which is another issue which we can talk about next time.