Khaw wants more to become engineers

Singapore

TRANSPORT Minister Khaw Boon Wan, who is preparing the Land Transport Authority (LTA) to take on possible rail operations and maintenance in future, wants to make engineering sexy.

Hoping to see more people joining this "important profession" so they can help build Singapore, he exhorted all chief executives on Friday to "go all out and expand the number of your scholarships" leading to degrees in high-productivity professions of engineering and architecture.

Mr Khaw, who is also the Coordinating Minister for Infrastructure, was speaking at the Joint Forum on Infrastructure Maintenance, at which the LTA, national water agency PUB, SBS Transit and SMRT Corp signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

The minister, himself an engineer by training, also directed the LTA to ramp up the number of its engineers to match the ramped-up pace of rail building.

"We need to work more closely with the operators if we are to improve maintenance-performance and close the gap with the best in class," he said.

Unfortunately, Singapore's current rail model separates LTA - the designer and builder - from SMRT and SBST, the maintainers and operators.

"From an economist's viewpoint, this allows for more competition in choosing the operator; from an engineer's viewpoint, it is not so ideal from the life-cycle perspective," he said.

He added that for future rail lines, there may be an opportunity to shape the way things are done, and that is one reason he wants LTA to build up its engineering team.

"They must establish a team that is able to take on operations and maintenance, if we decide to move in that direction. So while our immediate priority is to fix the current rail disruptions, our eyes are actually on the future."

Mr Khaw said that the idea of the MOU is to bring together the collective expertise from the various infrastructure sectors and raise the profile of the engineering community". It is the reason that the PUB, LTA and the two public transport operators SMRT and SBST - "literally the lifeblood of our country" - are the pioneer signatories.

Raising rail reliability has been Mr Khaw's priority, given the recent major service breakdowns. He said in his speech: "Today's MOU is part of that strategy to enhance the maintenance capability of the existing workforce."

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