[h=1]SOME NETIZENS ARE GOING OVERBOARD ON THIS WHOLE IDA SAGA[/h]
Post date:
22 Apr 2015 - 8:52pm
The recent hoo-hah by netizens regarding Infocomm’s employment of Nisha Padmanabhan, now a Singapore citizen, had gone overboard.
Nisha was found to possess an MBA from a degree mill, Southern Pacific University, which closed down. Infocomm defended her appointment by saying that she possesses a degree from the University of Mumbai, which it described as a ‘reputable university’ and had relevant work experience. (I will come back to this later.) She had been working satisfactorily at Infocomm for one year.
Netizens responded with outrage here and here. Some accused her of forging her qualifications which is libelous if proven untrue. Others have called for her to be sacked and her citizenship revoked. I am a Singaporean and also concerned about who can become a fellow Singaporean. Gaining citizenship is a more important issue to me than her employment at Infocomm, so I will deal with it first.
I certainly want our newly minted citizens to be of integrity and not to be a burden to our country. I checked publicly available sources on the requirements to be a Permanent Resident (PR) and a citizen. Government sources can be found here and here.
There are also non-government web resources, giving advice on applying for PR such as this one here. In a nutshell, while having a degree helps to get PR and later citizenship, it is not a requirement. So those who are calling for Nisha to be stripped of her citizenship have missed the point. It does not matter if she got her degrees from lousy universities because you do not need a degree to get PR or citizenship in the first place.
What our government is more interested in is your potential contribution to Singapore, not paper qualifications.
=> As in being able to vote for FAP during the GE?
The PR applicant must have either skills or money to get PR. You see, each of us cost the government money. Government has to spend more on schools, hospitals, police, infrastructure etc if the population increases. But each of us also has to pay taxes.
So it is important to accept net contributors to the public treasury and not net takers. Our immigration policy is more logical than President Obama’s policy. He wants to accept poorly educated and low earning illegal immigrants! These are people we typically cane to deter them from coming here.
The two most important schemes to become a PR are these:
1) The Professional/Technical and Skilled workers scheme (PTS) and
2) Global Investor Program.
Getting a PR under the PTS scheme (which accounts for about 95% of PRs) will usually take between one to four years. It depends on how much money you earn. The more you earn, the quicker you get your PR. The reason is that the more you earn, the more taxes you pay. This makes more sense than to admit people based on their paper qualifications.
For example, one of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates does not have a degree. But obviously, he would make a great catch for Singapore should he apply for PR. So it is ridiculous to base granting PR on your paper qualifications.
After you have been a PR for two years, you can apply for citizenship. Getting citizenship is not difficult if you have skills that can earn you a high income or lots of money to invest in Singapore. But it is very tough if you do not have either.
Singapore has a low birth rate and so we need to welcome foreigners to make up for this deficiency. Otherwise, our country will decline and Singaporeans will become poorer. Welcoming talented (defined as those who can earn high salaries) and rich investors seem to be the right policy.
=> Will flooding the country with fakeys whose main aim is to make a fast buck and balek kampong after that - while displacing true blue and well-qualified SGs in the process - help increase birth rate (OR further decrease birth rate)? So there lies the true intention of the ftrashisation policy, which is to shore up the FAP's flagging support among the true blue SGs during the GE!
Now let’s get back to Nisha and her employment at Infocomm. Some of the comments made by netizens are way overboard. Here is one:
“Besides that, I am also unhappy with the double standards held by the government. Previously, MOM prosecuted 25 foreigners for forging academic certificates. TWENTY of them were sentenced to FOUR weeks’ imprisonment. How come when these people work in private companies, you charge them BUT those who work in statutory board, you say it is alright?!?!“
Forgery is a serious accusation. The writer is saying that Nisha forged her certificates. I suspect the writer does not understand the definition of forgery. If Nisha forged her degrees, it means that she did not graduate from the Universities of Mumbai and South Pacific University.
If she was awarded degrees from these universities, then there was no forgery. The writer may be right that these were not reputable universities, but that is a different matter and to some extent a matter of opinion.
But was he right that these were not reputable universities? I would agree that the South Pacific was not reputable. It closed down. But she did get her first degree from Mumbai University which Infocomm regards as reputable.
Mumbai was ranked as the 551st best university in the world. The netizens are free to say this is not reputable. Or that it is a lousy university. But what do we mean by “reputable”. Who decides on what is “reputable?” Who decides which universities are good or bad? Must it be in the top 100 universities before their graduates can be employed in Singapore? No Indian university makes the grade if that is the case. Neither does our SMU. Our NUS is today ranked 22nd best in the world.
The Times Educational Supplement started ranking universities in 2004. Had there been rankings done 20 to 30 years ago, our NUS might have been ranked something like 500 to 1000. Yet our Civil Service has been employing NUS graduates since Singapore got Independence from Malaysia.
By the way, our SMU is not even ranked. Does this mean that our Civil Service should not employ SMU graduates? Do you think that SMU is not “reputable?” Lest snobbish graduates from NUS or NTU look down on SMU graduates, let me point out that SMU graduates command the highest starting salaries among local university graduates. Obviously, the employers think highly of them.
Ultimately, it is up to the employer to decide if your qualifications are good enough or not. Employers do not just look at your paper qualifications. They also look at your work experience. In my opinion, your degree is obsolete after you work for two years after graduation. After that time, employers look at your work experience and not your paper qualifications.
In Nisha’s case, she had worked for 5 years with Stone Apple, an Indian IT company in Singapore that was later taken over by Hitachi Consulting. Then she got her current job at Infocomm. Infocomm must have felt that she was qualified for the job. In any case, if she was subsequently found incompetent, Infocomm can always dismiss her. She has been working for Infocomm for about a year now.
So I don’t see what the fuss is over Infocomm employing her. Nor should they fuss over her citizenship. After all, she must have proven her ability to earn a high income before she could have gotten her PR which was probably awarded before she joined Infocomm.
Therefore, there is no need for netizens to behave like screeching monkeys as though some major crime had been committed. Much ado over nothing.
Cass Owary
TRS Contributor
Post date:
22 Apr 2015 - 8:52pm
The recent hoo-hah by netizens regarding Infocomm’s employment of Nisha Padmanabhan, now a Singapore citizen, had gone overboard.
Nisha was found to possess an MBA from a degree mill, Southern Pacific University, which closed down. Infocomm defended her appointment by saying that she possesses a degree from the University of Mumbai, which it described as a ‘reputable university’ and had relevant work experience. (I will come back to this later.) She had been working satisfactorily at Infocomm for one year.
Netizens responded with outrage here and here. Some accused her of forging her qualifications which is libelous if proven untrue. Others have called for her to be sacked and her citizenship revoked. I am a Singaporean and also concerned about who can become a fellow Singaporean. Gaining citizenship is a more important issue to me than her employment at Infocomm, so I will deal with it first.
I certainly want our newly minted citizens to be of integrity and not to be a burden to our country. I checked publicly available sources on the requirements to be a Permanent Resident (PR) and a citizen. Government sources can be found here and here.
There are also non-government web resources, giving advice on applying for PR such as this one here. In a nutshell, while having a degree helps to get PR and later citizenship, it is not a requirement. So those who are calling for Nisha to be stripped of her citizenship have missed the point. It does not matter if she got her degrees from lousy universities because you do not need a degree to get PR or citizenship in the first place.
What our government is more interested in is your potential contribution to Singapore, not paper qualifications.
=> As in being able to vote for FAP during the GE?
The PR applicant must have either skills or money to get PR. You see, each of us cost the government money. Government has to spend more on schools, hospitals, police, infrastructure etc if the population increases. But each of us also has to pay taxes.
So it is important to accept net contributors to the public treasury and not net takers. Our immigration policy is more logical than President Obama’s policy. He wants to accept poorly educated and low earning illegal immigrants! These are people we typically cane to deter them from coming here.
The two most important schemes to become a PR are these:
1) The Professional/Technical and Skilled workers scheme (PTS) and
2) Global Investor Program.
Getting a PR under the PTS scheme (which accounts for about 95% of PRs) will usually take between one to four years. It depends on how much money you earn. The more you earn, the quicker you get your PR. The reason is that the more you earn, the more taxes you pay. This makes more sense than to admit people based on their paper qualifications.
For example, one of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates does not have a degree. But obviously, he would make a great catch for Singapore should he apply for PR. So it is ridiculous to base granting PR on your paper qualifications.
After you have been a PR for two years, you can apply for citizenship. Getting citizenship is not difficult if you have skills that can earn you a high income or lots of money to invest in Singapore. But it is very tough if you do not have either.
Singapore has a low birth rate and so we need to welcome foreigners to make up for this deficiency. Otherwise, our country will decline and Singaporeans will become poorer. Welcoming talented (defined as those who can earn high salaries) and rich investors seem to be the right policy.
=> Will flooding the country with fakeys whose main aim is to make a fast buck and balek kampong after that - while displacing true blue and well-qualified SGs in the process - help increase birth rate (OR further decrease birth rate)? So there lies the true intention of the ftrashisation policy, which is to shore up the FAP's flagging support among the true blue SGs during the GE!
Now let’s get back to Nisha and her employment at Infocomm. Some of the comments made by netizens are way overboard. Here is one:
“Besides that, I am also unhappy with the double standards held by the government. Previously, MOM prosecuted 25 foreigners for forging academic certificates. TWENTY of them were sentenced to FOUR weeks’ imprisonment. How come when these people work in private companies, you charge them BUT those who work in statutory board, you say it is alright?!?!“
Forgery is a serious accusation. The writer is saying that Nisha forged her certificates. I suspect the writer does not understand the definition of forgery. If Nisha forged her degrees, it means that she did not graduate from the Universities of Mumbai and South Pacific University.
If she was awarded degrees from these universities, then there was no forgery. The writer may be right that these were not reputable universities, but that is a different matter and to some extent a matter of opinion.
But was he right that these were not reputable universities? I would agree that the South Pacific was not reputable. It closed down. But she did get her first degree from Mumbai University which Infocomm regards as reputable.
Mumbai was ranked as the 551st best university in the world. The netizens are free to say this is not reputable. Or that it is a lousy university. But what do we mean by “reputable”. Who decides on what is “reputable?” Who decides which universities are good or bad? Must it be in the top 100 universities before their graduates can be employed in Singapore? No Indian university makes the grade if that is the case. Neither does our SMU. Our NUS is today ranked 22nd best in the world.
The Times Educational Supplement started ranking universities in 2004. Had there been rankings done 20 to 30 years ago, our NUS might have been ranked something like 500 to 1000. Yet our Civil Service has been employing NUS graduates since Singapore got Independence from Malaysia.
By the way, our SMU is not even ranked. Does this mean that our Civil Service should not employ SMU graduates? Do you think that SMU is not “reputable?” Lest snobbish graduates from NUS or NTU look down on SMU graduates, let me point out that SMU graduates command the highest starting salaries among local university graduates. Obviously, the employers think highly of them.
Ultimately, it is up to the employer to decide if your qualifications are good enough or not. Employers do not just look at your paper qualifications. They also look at your work experience. In my opinion, your degree is obsolete after you work for two years after graduation. After that time, employers look at your work experience and not your paper qualifications.
In Nisha’s case, she had worked for 5 years with Stone Apple, an Indian IT company in Singapore that was later taken over by Hitachi Consulting. Then she got her current job at Infocomm. Infocomm must have felt that she was qualified for the job. In any case, if she was subsequently found incompetent, Infocomm can always dismiss her. She has been working for Infocomm for about a year now.
So I don’t see what the fuss is over Infocomm employing her. Nor should they fuss over her citizenship. After all, she must have proven her ability to earn a high income before she could have gotten her PR which was probably awarded before she joined Infocomm.
Therefore, there is no need for netizens to behave like screeching monkeys as though some major crime had been committed. Much ado over nothing.
Cass Owary
TRS Contributor
