Carol John, 27, doesn’t own a bed. Every night she sleeps on thin mattresses which she shares with her three young children. Outside her one-room flat, a smell of sewage lingers in the common corridor.

“I can’t save anything, it’s so difficult for me,” John told Reuters. John, who is unemployed, relies on her husband’s S$600 (US$420) monthly salary and a S$100 government handout.

“We don’t benefit at all from the economy. As far as I know, my husband’s pay hasn’t gone up,” she said.

There is no minimum wage system in Singapore because it supposedly hurts the economy and GDP growth so you have folks earning S$600. (Strange, I thought Australia is still floating as a country, and so is New Zealand) What is a S$100 subsidy supposed to do? Work miracles?

No long term solution in sight

Has her GRC or constituency minister and CDC figured out how to help people like Ms John and her family? Is there a policy in place to help them learn to fish, instead of giving them insufficient fishes? Does they even know about the subsidies and programs open to them? From talking to people from the ground, I realized that many folks in the lower income group frequently do not know about the help available to them and if they do, are turned off by the bureaucratic red tape and the unreasonable time taken for actual help to be rendered.

Unrealistic “help”

A mother with three kids had gone to a Meet the People’s (MTP) session asking for help. Her husband was in jail for drug related offences and she was at the end of her teeter - she was unemployed due to child caring. At the point of the MTP session, she had only $2.20 in her wallet.

Her MP sent her away with a S$50 NTUC voucher and direction to approach the Central CDC for “application”. The application took three weeks of paper pushing and signature signing and official approval before any help could be rendered. Is that $50 voucher supposed to have lasted her three weeks? Why does it take three weeks to approve a simple application? Is that what the MTP sessions are about - getting rid of the “problem” with a NTUC voucher and sending the “problem elsewhere”?

Do any of the million dollar salaried ministers know or even empathize about folks who are living a life of subsistence? Have they forgotten that while they drive their Lexuses and BMWs, that there are folks who don’t even have money to take the bus?

I have many questions but I get no answers.

**

The poor is getting poorer

I had written about the soaring prices in Singapore and how the lower income group cannot even afford three basic meals.

I had written about class divides in Singapore and how the chasm is widening.

From my blogging, I realized that things in Singapore had not changed much from 2006. Whatever happened to the promise that “nobody will be left behind” and “it will be a land of opportunities for all”? In fact, the income gap between the classes keeps widening. And it will keep widening if we keep running Singapore like a corporation - primarily aggressive in growing the economy. The poor will get poorer. In the upcoming quarter, we will see an increase of 21% in our electricity bills - click here for the financial statistics being explained clearly.

I hope that Khoo Chin Hean of EMA (Energy Market Authority) is not yet another Marie Antoinette at the top when he said,

“There is a lot of use which can be curtailed. There is probably quite a bit of wasteful usage. It is this kind of usage we can be more mindful of and take measures to manage our consumption.”

While the above might be true for the middle to top income earners, it is certainly not accurate for the lower income group. If Ms John is a yardstick by which we measure the situation of the lower income group, they probably have the bare minimum to survive on and that would hardly warrant “wasteful usage”.

Seah Choon Seng, executive director, Consumers Association of Singapore, said:

“The 20 per cent adjustment in tariff price is quite hefty for consumers to bear and I suppose one of those very high adjustments we see in many years. We feel that the companies involved in the utilities business should work harder in improving their efficiency to bring down the costs for consumers.”

Again, I agree with this in the context of the lower income group. Facts remain that not only their income have not increased, it had been eroded by our inflation rate of 6.5%. Add to this, the coming utility spike and the public transport hike in October, they are going to find it harder to live than ever.

I do not wish to see another anomic suicide in Singapore because the poor is finding it too difficult to even live on.