Phuket Governor Chamroen Tipayapongtada’s solutions to the problem were rejected.

Urak Lawoi community leader Ngim Damrongkaset said the reason for the refusal was that they believe the land deed was unlawfully acquired in the first place and demanded that the Lands Department revoke the deed first.

The area that Phuket province intended to purchase for the sea people was a 19-rai plot of land, already inspected by the Department of Special Investigation (DSI), where the sea people had supposedly settled for 300 years.

“It is clear that the land was ours and we have a rightful claim over the land, so we do not agree with the province’s decision to buy the land,” Ngim said.

Preeda Khongpan, commissioner on the sea people’s land and spiritual area problem-solving board, stated that the province’s plan to purchase the disputed land was unclear.

“There were no details at all on how the province would buy the land from the landowner. It would have to be passed on to the Cabinet for consideration, as they would be using the country’s money to purchase this land. And if the land is bought using the land bank mechanism, the sea people will have to pay back the debt to the land bank in instalments, which they will not agree to,” Preeda explained.

“It would be inappropriate to buy this land, as the DSI has already proved that the land belongs to the sea people and the Land Department should just do their job and revoke the land deed.”

She suspected that the offer was just a plan by the landowner to avoid losing the land outright.

The offer was presented by Chamroen on Monday. He said the province would coordinate with the Social Development and Human Security Ministry to acquire 19 rai of contested land from the private owner to develop housing with a budget of Bt313 million.

Meanwhile, in the conflict over 33 rai of land owned by Baron World Trade Company, which has laid claim to the religious area of the sea people and access to the beach, he said the province had set up a team to measure the land between the disputed land to the sea around three metres wide and asked for three more metres of land in width to make create a right of way for the sea people.

Ngim said the sea people had also turned down this offer from the province and insisted on using the original way to the shrine and the beach.

“We urge the Land Department to inspect the land deed of this plot as well. We do not mean to reclaim all the land, but we want our original path, the shrine and the beach access to be excluded from this plot of land,” he said.

Meanwhile, following investigation into the assault on the sea community, the Phuket police have issued 14 arrest warrants for people from Baron World Trade. Six of them have surrendered to the police and have already been released on bail.

The Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives has 220,868 members with total savings of more than Bt259 million, the Government Savings Bank has 153,070 members with total savings of more than Bt210 million and Krungthai Bank has 26,378 members with total savings of almost Bt89 million.

The NSF office has 72 members with total savings of more than Bt133,400.

Besides members paying their own contribution under the scheme, the government will contribute to the fund according to a specified criteria so members receive a monthly pension after retirement. The NSF aims to provide a safety net for almost 25 million self-employed and non-formal workers who are not covered under state pension programmes or private provident funds. The government expects about 3 million people to register with the NSF in the first five years.

Sansern said the government had a policy to let people exercise their right to transfer their state pension savings fund under Article 40 the Social Security Act to the NSF by March 23. For details, contact hotline 1506.

More coordination between agencies and people as well as a better understanding of the nature of wild elephants is necessary to avoid attacks by the animal, which is Thailand’s national symbol.

With reports of wild elephants frequently destroying crops and property in recent headlines, a forum on seeking solutions to the problem was held yesterday in Bangkok by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation’s Catalysing Sustainability of Thailand’s Protected Area System. Some 100 officials from related agencies attended the event.

Naris Bhumpakphan, a lecturer at Kasersart University’s Faculty of Forestry, said this was not a new problem as man-elephant confrontations could be traced back to ancient times. However, he said, the recent conflict between the two species was largely due to the loss of wild habitat.

“Both people and large animals prefer to live on flat fertile land, hence forest encroachment to build farms fragment forests into pockets of mountainous area, which is unsuitable for elephants to live on,” Naris said. “The boom of cash crops have led to the increase of plantations around forests and this crop is seen by the elephants as easily accessible food, so they invade plantations.”

Moreover, Department inspector-general Thongtham Suksawang said degraded forestland was also being reforested with plants that were unsuitable for elephants.

Naris also pointed out that short-term procedures taken to solve the elephants’ invasion problem were indeed ineffective and worsened the situation.

“People’s normal methods of keeping away wild elephants – such as building electric fences or creating food sources directly in the forest – have proved to be ineffective,” he said.

He reasoned that elephants were intelligent animals and that they knew how to break the human line of defence. He explained that scare tactics usually work in the beginning before the animals learn to overcome them.

“Creating food supply in the forest will eventually increase the artificial population of elephants and in the end the number of elephants will grow beyond the forest’s capacity and the intrusion will resume,” he said.

The Department estimates that there are some 3,000 wild elephants residing in Thai forests, while the number of pachyderms in some national parks, such as the five parks in the East, has increased over the last decade, giving rise to more elephant invasions. Working on the Kui Buri Model on elephant control, Wayuphong Jitwijak from World Wildlife Fund Thailand explained that it has been successful at the Kui Buri National Park, as it helps provide a secure home for elephants that is free from human pressure and has enough food supply.

“It needs cooperation and a clear policy from the authorities, as climate change is shifting the weather pattern and decreasing the food supply for elephants. We also have to encourage people to understand the nature of elephants as well as have a clear plan on compensating the victims of elephant attacks,” Wayuphong said.

A source said the first person who queued at ATMs near the Siriban Shopping Centre in Muang district used several ATM cards to buy tickets for himself and his relatives, which resulted in him taking longer than normal to complete the purchases.

Some vendors complained for fear the tickets would run out, resulting in a heated argument and dares to file a police complaint.

Meanwhile, retail vendors in Buri Ram and neighbouring provinces such as Surin and Mahasarakram had since Wednesday night camped in front of ATMs across Buri Ram’s Muang district to improve their chances of getting tickets.

Vendors Yong Kloomya and Kiattisak Kongprakon said they went home empty-handed the last time tickets were offered despite waiting in queue, so this time they camped overnight.

If they couldn’t get tickets again, they would buy them from middlemen at Bt78 or Bt79 per apiece and re-sell to customers for Bt80.

Yong and Kiattisak called on the government to allocate tickets to registered vendors so that they did not have to camp overnight.

A similar scene was seen in Udon Thani province, where many vendors including disabled people set up tents around ATMs ahead of buying tickets.

While queuing in Loei’s Muang district, Khrueawan Lasa said she wanted the government to clearly survey the exact number of lottery retail vendors and register them for ticket allocations at a fixed time and fixed dates.

She said people who reserved tickets were not real vendors and officials served as middlemen in the sale of those tickets.

He was paid Bt20 million in instalments as consulting fee and for expenses.

The Auditor-General’s Office had checked the transactions and would follow up on tax payments.

The office also was told the foundries had budgeted additional overheads up to 10 per cent from the expected profit so this didn’t raise questions of irregularity.

The trader had used some of the money to construct a temple but later decided to gather the remaining money and raise more to bring the total back to Bt20 million.

He transferred the money via his foundry’s bank account to the park fund, which presented a receipt for the money. The office had tried to evaluate if the payment to the trader was reasonable and learned that the cost of each statue had actually been reduced from Bt70 million to Bt15 million-Bt50 million.

The office still had a few people left to question and should disclose the findings along with the Public Sector Anti-Corruption Commission soon, he added.

For better planning, Ovec will have statistics related to nearly 1 million vocational students, he told The Nation in a recent interview.

The interim charter’s Article 44 was used to issue the transfer order, published in the Royal Gazette on February 5.

Chaipreuk said the aim was to help private vocational/technical colleges achieve quality and standards that matched those of public colleges.

“We must elevate and strengthen private schools, [so that] what is substandard or improper could be dealt with,” he said.

Chaipreuk said the private colleges agreed with the move. They saw a decline in new students because many youths chose the better-equipped public colleges. Some places survived due to their reputation in specialised fields or by opening up only courses such as marketing and accounting, he said.

“Some private colleges saw student numbers shrink from thousands to a few hundreds,” he said, adding one Surin college would soon fold and was passing on its students to Ovec to ensure they would graduate.

Private colleges get a budget of Bt4.532 billion in per-head subsidy. Now they want a shift from the Office of the Private Education Commission (Opec)’s monthly payment method to a semester basis for more streamlined management, he said.

Chaipreuk said he understood Opec’s monthly subsidy. “The rate of students getting in and out of private colleges was high and the number of students reporting at some colleges was also high when the semester started. They then decreased [possibly a doctored figure for subsidy or student loan benefits]. So Opec resorted to paying the subsidy monthly,” he said.

For fiscal year 2017, Opec had set aside Bt4.4 billion for private colleges, which Ovec would take over, he said. Ovec would pay private colleges the subsidy at 80 per cent early – as in May-June for the first semester and in October-November for the second semester.

Ovec would check on the student turnover rate to provide more money or retrieve excess funds in the subsequent semester, he added.

It was also considering whether to implement a per-head subsidy for students over 25 in the same model as in non-formal education.

Ovec would review the colleges’ teaching-learning standards and help with what they lacked, possibly via resource sharing, he said.

“We must collect data from private colleges, number of students and teachers, fields of study. How can some only have 5-19 students? It’s not worth operating,” Chaipreuk said.

Among such schools was Sara Buri Technical College, which, according to its website, offered only information technology. As of last October, there were 84 students at the vocational certificate level and 59 at the advanced vocational certificate level. Besides having its own research institute, teacher development office, professional qualification institute and development budgets, Ovec also had a Teachers’ Club, furnished with budget for teacher training, Chaipreuk said. The club could provide partial funding, which would be met by colleges’ contribution, to arrange teacher training, he said. In the past, private-college teachers received little training and the turnover rate was high.

Ovec now supervises 886 vocational colleges covering 976,615 students – 425 public colleges with 674,113 students and 461 private colleges with 302,502 students.

The Association of Private Technological and Vocational Educational Colleges of Thailand chairman, Jompong Mongkolvanich, said he had been waiting for this change. He said a meeting of the associations last September called for the transfer. They believed it would elevate academic standards and enable vocational education to better cater to the needs of the industrial and service sectors, regional clusters and the Asean Economic Community.

“We want public and private colleges’ joint recruitment of students via a provincial-level mechanism while curriculum standards would be lifted in the same direction. In the past, the Dual Vocational Education (DVE) cooperation between vocational colleges and the industrial sector didn’t include us,” he said.

Thavorn Chalassathien from the Federation of Thai Industries, agreed with the transfer in principle. He believed it would benefit vocational education, particularly private college operators and students, through resource sharing and a common direction. It would be convenient for the private sector to coordinate with vocational education people and DVE would be achieved more easily.

Nakhon Ratchasima’s Kusoom Technology College director Supaset Khanakul said this change would improve student quality and other aspects while providing private colleges with more government support.

It would also benefit students training under DVE, he said. If it didn’t yield results as expected, he hoped people would be held accountable.