OPINION

The rocky road ahead

Recent reports on the Mekong channel improvement and so-called "rock blasting" are inaccurate and misleading.

Even the presence of a few Chinese vessels surveying the area between Chiang Saen and Chiang Khong were enough to raise alarm and stir the population and local environmentalists into thinking that the Chinese will soon come to destroy the entire Mekong by rock blasting reefs and rapids and dredging shoals under their Mekong-Lancang navigation improvement programme.

No one doubts that using dynamite for river work and rock clearance is an environmental issue.

But it is the price we need to pay for a better future and to have environmentally friendly waterway transport as opposed to congested road transport.

It is the developer's responsibility indeed to design navigation channels that cause the minimum damage to the environment and aquatic life.

And such responsibility starts with a detailed survey, which is now going on.

No one benefits from a ruined river for the sake of destruction.

Those who are designing the channel are trying to find the best solution in a difficult river stretch where scattered rock outcrops and submerged obstacles challenge navigation.

The developer has no reason to destroy everything outside the channel boundaries but is creating a new space by clearing that which is constraining the flow of water to the river.

This is necessary to keep water levels upstream and downstream similar.

Re: "Don't sensationalise", (PostBag, May 6).

Kantanit Sukontasap has apparently fallen for the cockamamie argument that because the Royal Thai Navy is carrying out its "regular allocation" in purchasing the submarines that it is somehow acceptable to squander scarce financial resources.

Khun Kantanit's assertion that it is "impossible or beyond common sense" to take away the navy's allocated budget is in itself beyond common sense. No government agency, department or ministry should be so entitled as to think that its budget is "untouchable". All departments need to be accountable for the use of taxpayers' money and be able to defend their proposed expenditures in an open and transparent manner.

If the Royal Thai Navy has a budget that is so bloated that it can afford unnecessary weapons and toys, a common-sense approach would be to reduce its budget and reallocate the excess to higher priority sectors. Making such measured decisions on how Thai taxpayers' money is to be used is the very essence of good governance.

Re: "It's time to rethink road safety", (Opinion, May 5).

Rethinking road safety has its merits, but I live in a rural area in eastern Thailand where the police are absent on rural country roads and where people drive totally drunk, motorcycles race day and night, four little kids at a time can be seen squeezed onto motorcycles without helmets, people laugh and gab away on their mobiles as they're driving, and where the 60kph speed limit is translated to 100kph and up.

The traffic cops work a 9am-noon shift, are gone till the 3pm-5pm shift, and only on the main roads, (of which there are three), and are not seen again until the following day. Call the local police station for a problem in the late evening and the response usually is, "Sorry, we don't patrol that road".

Re: "The good old days", (PostBag, May 6).

If you took offence at what I wrote then I must apologise.

What I wrote was plain and factual and the situation at the time. There was no discrimination as mentioned by you as far as I can remember. By the way, I was not reminiscing. I was just responding to my grandson's curiosity. Question asked, question answered.