Opening new villages affect plans to develop infrastructure for orang asli

KUALA LUMPUR: The opening of new small villages by the orang asli community will affect the government’s plans to develop infrastructure in their settlement areas.
Minister of Rural and Regional Development Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob said the orang asli community must immediately stop opening new villages, so that the government’s efforts to provide complete infrastructure to all 853 orang asli villages throughout the country can proceed.
“Right now, the government is focusing on providing complete infrastructure to 853 Orang Asli original villages and more than 80% already have electricity, water and roads. But we still find more than 100 new splinter villages which have been created.
“If they (orang asli) continue opening splinter villages, the problem of developing these villages will never end because we have to attend to the development in splinter villages first. Sometimes they open new villages in areas which are further away, on private land, and this slows down the development in the other original villages,” he said.
He was speaking to reporters after officiating a thanksgiving ceremony for the Rural Electricity Supply Project at the Hulu Kemensah orang asli settlement in Hulu Klang, near here today.

Also present were director-general of Orang Asli Development Department (Jakoa) Mohd Jamalludin Kasbi and senior general manager (corporate affairs) of Tenaga Nasional Berhad Datuk Mohd Aminuddin Mohd Amin.
In a separate development, Ismail said only 31,000 of the 136,000ha of land belonging to the orang asli have been gazetted so far due to the lack of cooperation from the community.
“By right, surveying works of the area by Jakoa should have been completed ... but we are hampered because there are some orang asli who have been taken in by the lies of the opposition and have refused to let their lands be surveyed and demanded that the land to be gazetted be expanded, we are facing resistance from six orang asli villages."
He added that work to gazette the land in the six villages will be postponed while work in other villages will go ahead.
Meanwhile, village head Ebak Pulasan, 75, said the villagers who are of the Temuan tribe would no longer have to live in the darkness they endured for 15 years as they have been receiving electricity since early last year.
“I am very happy ... we used to depend on candles and lamps at night. Now, the nights are bright and we are no longer in darkness." — Bernama