PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Ques­tions about the Re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion Blue­print have once again been raised af­ter it was said that project is ex­pect­ed to cre­ate in ex­cess of 51,000 jobs an­nu­al­ly.

In Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo's bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion on Mon­day, he said the project could hit a peak of job cre­ation of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 72,000 jobs in 2028 across en­gi­neer­ing, con­struc­tion, steel­work, and trans­port.

How­ev­er, Pres­i­dent of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Ag­gre­gate Pro­duc­ers Al­liance Nigel Tenia says while the job cre­ation tar­get is en­cour­aing, the lack of de­tails about the Re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion Blue­print is still a con­cern.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia on Mon­day, Tenia said, "Whilst the job cre­ation was quan­ti­fied, we still don't have a start date as to when ground is go­ing to be bro­ken on the first project. We still don't have a ge­o­graph­ic lo­ca­tion as to where the clus­ter of projects will be. Nor do we un­der­stand where they're go­ing to be, not to men­tion the clus­ter. Where they're go­ing to be in­di­vid­u­al­ly, if they're go­ing to be large­ly down south, if they're go­ing to be in cen­tral, if they're go­ing to be in east, if we're go­ing to look at To­co, if we're go­ing to look at the West­ern Penin­su­la. We've not had that."

Tenia said while Fi­nance Min­is­ter did state that more de­tails will come from the Min­is­ter of Works and In­fra­struc­ture, it was dif­fi­cult to be hap­py about the news due to the lim­it­ed in­for­ma­tion.

Sev­er­al oth­er stake­hold­ers and econ­o­mists were asked about the job cre­ation tar­get, but most sim­i­lar­ly stat­ed they were un­able to com­ment on it with­out more in­for­ma­tion.