Rambharat eyes Chaguanas East

SPEAKING at the PNM meeting at Signature Hall Chaguanas on Tuesday, Agriculture Minister Clarence Rambharat said he has moved from Rio Claro/Mayaro to Chaguanas East, making central Trinidad his new home.

“I have an agenda to work as the representative of this constituency in the next general election,” announced Rambharat, who is a Senator and was the PNM candidate for the Mayaro constituency in the last general election.

Senator Avinash Singh, he said, will be taking over the work he did in Rio Claro/Mayaro when the election bell rings.

Ramharat admitted the last time he spoke on a PNM platform was at the close of the local government election campaign in 2016. This is so, he said as the party had to shift its focus to other important matters. He said the PNM had a long list of things it wanted to give the people of TT, including hospitals, houses and schools.

One of the first thing he sought to do as minister was to look at the Land Settlement Agency (LSA) and make land more affordable to those people who are already regularised or those people have to be regularised, Rambharat said.

There are people who are residential tenants of state land in Arouca, St Augustine, Curepe, Toco and right through to Port of Spain on the East-West Corridor, he said.

“We have people who have lease-status land for 30 years, and when these leases expire, people are forced to pay a fresh set of annual rent.”

Cabinet decided, he said where someone is leasing residential lands, they will pay a discounted 30 per cent for that land.

"In the case of Petrotrin workers and former workers of Petrotrin, as a government we decided beyond the collective agreement to deal with the matter of land, giving workers an opportunity to own land."