SRJK(T) Batu Kawan ad-hoc parents committee are keen to buy a three-acre land to add on to existing two-acre site for a new school and wants the Penang government to set a reasonable price.
GEORGE TOWN: A Batu Kawan Tamil school ad-hoc parents committee wants the Penang government to set a price for it to buy a three-acre land adjoining the currently under-construction new school building site.
The committee, namely SRJK(T) Batu Kawan People Action Team, offered to buy the land in a memorandum submitted to Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng in Komtar this morning.
A junior staff from the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) information department, G Revatic, received the memorandum from the committee, led by chairman A Govindasamy Anna Thurai.
Several Batu Kawan schoolchildren’s parents and local residents accompanied Govindasamy, who formerly was a deputy chairman of the school Parents Teachers Association.
The committee decided to offer to buy the three-acre land to add on to the existing two-acre site on which the current school building is being built, after the state government rejected an earlier committee requested it for free.
The current two-acre site was approved in 2006 by the previous Barisan Nasional state government for a new school building.
The committee plans to organise fund-raising events to accumulate enough funds to buy the land.
“We hope the Chief Minister will quote us a reasonable price to enable us to afford to buy the three acres,” Govindasamy told newsmen after submitting the memorandum, the committee’s fourth in two years.
In a letter dated June 18, 2013 from Deputy Chief Minister II (DCM2) P Ramasamy to Govindasamy, the state government stated that it had no plans to allocate extra land for the school.
The DCM2′s letter was in reply to an earlier memorandum dated June 6 submitted by the committee to the CMO.
The committee has previously submitted similar memorandums to the CMO on Nov 22, 2010 and Jan 7, 2011 requesting the Pakatan Rakyat government to alienate and gazette the land.
Gelang Patah Declaration
Since the three-acre land had not been alienated for development, Govindasamy envisages Lim’s administration facing little difficulty in selling the land to the committee.
He was confident that Lim would consider their request in line with his party’s Gelang Patah Declaration (GPD), launched by Lim’s father and DAP supremo Kit Siang on March 31 in the run up to general election.
He said that Item 3 of the GPD pledges: ‘To ensure that all national school type Tamil schools become fully funded and the infrastructure of every single school is up to par with national schools.’
The committee wants at least five acres of land to develop the Tamil school on par with the national standard of primary schools in the country.
The committee wants the extra three-acre land from the state to add on other school facilities, including a field, a resource room, a library, a multi-purpose hall and a science laboratory.
Once the state has set aside the land, the committee plans to request the federal government to build the facilities on it.
Following a survey yesterday, Govindasamy said the committee found that currently about 30% of the new school construction work, which commenced late last year, had been completed.
The new building would cost the BN federal government about RM6.3 million.
The new four-storey building, scheduled to be ready next year, is being built about 1km away from the current single-storey school building, which is housed in a renovated vacated estate quarters.
The school moved to the makeshift quarters when its previous wooden building was torn down in 2003 due to termite infestation.
About 150 primary pupils are enrolled now in the school.
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