A total of 491 students applied for the government’s Rf10 million loan scheme for Maldivian students to pursue higher education, the Ministry of Human Resources has revealed.
Deputy Minister Aminath Ali explained to newspaper Haveeru that 50 students in the country and 44 studying abroad will be chosen for the scheme, with loans ranging from Rf10,000 to Rf50,000 for the former category and Rf150,000 to Rf250,000 for the latter.
While loans were issued from the Bank of Maldives for the previous rounds of the scheme, Ali said the ministry was currently in talks with the Bank of Ceylon and hoped to process the applications within the next two weeks.
Loans amounting to Rf26 million were issued to 1,158 students in the first round.
Some 522 members of the Provident Fund invested Rf10.7 million (US$832,680) in public companies following an announcement by the Finance Ministry of the opportunity to purchase government shares of listed companies during the period May-June 2010, reports Haveeru.
According to the ministry, 27,367 shares from the Maldives Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC), 11,517 shares from the Maldives Transport and Contracting Company (MTCC), 10,396 shares from the Bank of Maldives (BML), and 6,969 shares from the State Trading Organisation (STO), were sold during the three months.
In September, STO revealed that 16.88 percent of its shares was now owned by the public.
In addition to investing in public companies, the Finance Ministry has invited members of the Provident Fund to purchase bonds from the Housing Development Corporation (HDC).
Southern Utilities Company signed an agreement with India’s Integrity Projects Limited on Thursday to produce electricity for Gnaviyani Fuvahmulah by burning waste at high temperatures.
Managing Director Hussein Shahid told newspaper Haveeru that preparations were underway to begin the project in November.
In July, the utility company for the South Province announced a bio-mass electricity project as well as a US$40 million project with India’s Suzlon company to install wind turbines in Fuvahmulah and Addu Atoll.
Further, Southern Utilities Company also plans to build a hydro-power plant in collaboration with the UNDP and a Belgian company.
The White House is going solar after all – a home improvement that carries modest energy benefits but much larger symbolic importance, writes the Washington Post.
Of course, Obama is a ways behind the Maldives president, Mohamed Nasheed, who on Thursday will put the final touches on a solar photovoltaic system on his official residence. The low-lying group of atolls in the Indian Ocean is vulnerable to sea-level rise, and Nasheed has emerged as one of the developing world’s most vocal proponents of curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Nasheed has pledged to make the Maldives carbon-neutral by 2020.
It isn’t the first time the White House has used solar energy. President Jimmy Carter put 32 solar panels on the roof in the late 1970s, but President Ronald Reagan removed them in 1986. Two grass-roots campaigns have recently been lobbying President Obama to restore them as a sign of his commitment to renewable energy.
The roof of the White House residence will get solar panels and a solar water heater, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s chair, Nancy Sutley, announced Tuesday.
“This project reflects President Obama’s strong commitment to U.S. leadership in solar energy and the jobs it will create here at home,” Chu said. “Deploying solar energy technologies across the country will help America lead the global economy for years to come.”
A campaign launched by Oakland, Calif.-based Sungevity called Solar on the White House and another by 350.org founder Bill McKibben tried to get Obama to reinstall solar panels.
“The White House did the right thing, and for the right reasons: They listened to the Americans who asked for solar on their roof, and they listened to the scientists and engineers who told them this is the path to the future,” McKibben said in a statement.
“If it has anything like the effect of the White House garden, it could be a trigger for a wave of solar installations across the country and around the world,” he said.
The Civil Court has rejected a lawsuit filed today by the opposition coalition against the planned US$25 airport development fee to be charged by Indian infrastructure giant GMR, which recently won the bid to redevelop Male’ International Airport.
The coalition argue that any new tax must be approved by parliament, as per the constitution. However the Civil court dismissed the lawsuit noting that the plan had not yet been implemented.
Former Qari Hussein Thaufeeq, arrested last month on multiple charges of child sex abuse, has been transferred to house arrest, reports Haveeru.
Renowned Qari Thaufeeq, Maafannu Dreamy Light, was arrested on 17 August this year and faces up to 18 years imprisonment if found guilty.
He was transferred to house arrest on Friday, as confirmed by the Criminal Court and the police.
The penalty for child sex abuse, according to the Child Sex Abuse (Special Provisions) Act, is 10-14 years but can be extended to 15-18 years if the accused was in a position of trust with the childrenhe allegedly abused.
Thaufeeq was a resource person at the Centre for Holy Quran in Male’ when the allegations were made against him.
Fifty couples, more than three times the daily average, are planning to get married on Sunday the 10 October 2010, reports Haveeru.
The binary number 10-10-10 prompted many to lodge applications at the Family Court to have their marriage ceremony performed on the day. The Family Court approved 50 applications, and told Haveeru that it will try and accommodate all requests.
On average 15-20 marriages are performed daily. On dates that are easy to remember – and leave little chance of forgetting the anniversary – the average always increases manifold. 87 couples got married on 08-08-08, 56 on 07-07-07 and 63 on 06-06-06, says Haveeru.
Adopting proven sources of renewable energy such as wind and solar will reduce both the price of electricity in the Maldives and cut down on price fluctuations caused by the expensive importation of fossil fuels, claims Danny Kennedy.
He would know. The former Greenpeace campaigner turned solar power entrepreneur is riding a surge of interest in the renewable technology, spurred by economic rather than environmental imperatives.
“The solar industry grew 40 percent during the recession,” he tells Minivan News.
“The average price in the US is now US$0.24 a kilowatt, which makes solar power already a third cheaper than grid electricity in the Maldives.”
The Australian environmental campaigner ran Greenpeace campaigns across the Pacific in places such as Papa New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Fiji, prior to moving to the United States and founding Sungevity, the residential solar company that is now the third largest such provider in the country after just a few years in operation.
Kennedy is in town to oversee the pro-bono installation of 48 photovoltaic (PV) modules on the roof of Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed’s house, ‘Muleaage’, which convert solar radiation into direct current electricity using photovoltaic semiconductors.
Nasheed has already agreed to personally help install the units, which Kennedy expects will save the country US$300,000 in electricity over the 25-year warrantied lifespan of the units.
Sungevity calculated the solar production potential of Nasheed’s roof from its office in Oakland California, using aerial images from Microsoft’s mapping software.
The method uses a fiendishly clever piece of trigonometry developed by a young student from Sydney Grammar School in Australia, that takes the altitude of the photographing plane from the image’s metadata then uses trigonometry to calculate the angle and direction of the potential customer’s roof, and then plugs in known quantities such as the area’s solar potential and price of electricity.
The result is that customers can determine the amount of electricity the unit will generate and potential savings, over the internet, “with plus or minus one percent margin of error. That’s better than sending a kid onto the roof with a tape measure, which introduces human error.”
The schoolboy’s innovation stunned the Redmond heavyweight sent over to Sungevity from Microsoft to see how the software worked, who told Kennedy that the company couldn’t have done such a thing “with 300 of our own engineers.”
Installing the units on Nasheed’s roof is now the last phase of the operation.
“We installed the rails today, and we’ll install the PV modules over the next few days. There are still some conduits to install to the generating room, and some carpentry to do,” Kennedy explains.
As the President’s house is connected to the grid in Male’, the solar cells will feed electricity back into the grid and help power the city when Nasheed is not running the air conditioning or using the microwave.
“My sense is that he’s trying to do something symbolic and make a statement about solutions to climate change,” Kennedy said. “He seems to be trying to lead by example.”
Founder of Sungevity Danny Kennedy suggests the Maldives can develop and export its expertise in renewable energy
The light stuff
The driving force behind solar power is now economic, says Kennedy.
While the capital expenditure for a small unit runs to US$30,000, installations in countries like the US are heavily incentivised and banks are increasingly offering ‘solar financing’ so customers can avoid the upfront hit.
“Solar is now about saving money,” Kennedy says. “The US and Australia give cashback on solar installations, while in the EU the model is a feed-in tariff. In Germany the model pays 40 euro cents per kilowatt hour, so if you install a solar system with a 20 year lifespan, you can sit back and let the thing turn a profit.”
As a result, “Germany‘s projected installation this year is 7000 megawatts – by comparison, Male’s powerplant generates 38.76 megawatts.”
The UK is not far behind Germany, with a proposed 31 pence feed-in tariff: “The UK solar market is going to go gangbusters in the next few years,” Kennedy says.
Feed-in tariffs are the fastest way to promote quick adoption of the technology, Kennedy explains, but incentive models – cashback and feed-in tariffs – “take on the vested interests involved in fossil fuels.”
“The Maldives can move to clean fuel, hedging against fuel price rises while taking on the vested interests of incumbent technology,” Kennedy suggests.
The flat and predictable cost of solar power contrasts with that of fossil fuels, he says, which are expensive for a country like the Maldives to import, subject to price flucutations, and vulnerable to Middle Eastern instability.
“While a small system may cost up to $30,000, it will pay itself back tenfold over its lifespan. It’s a safe and predictable return on investment,” he says.
In the US at least, the price of grid electricity is rising by seven percent per annum, Kennedy explains. The cost of solar units is meanwhile plummeting as production of the devices, led by China, skyrockets.
“Every doubling in production of PV modules represents an 18 percent reduction in price,” Kennedy explains.
“The Chinese have noticed this are increasing production massively, and have doubled production twice in the last three years. There has been a 50 percent drop in price in the last 18 months.”
A country like the Maldives with comparatively low energy requirements has the potential to meet much of its energy demands through a combination of solar, wind and wet (tidal) renewable energy generation, Kennedy suggests, as well as create a great many jobs in the sector.
And if the German experience is anything to go by, that expertise is soon going to be in high demand across the world.
“German companies like Bosch said early on that they are going to become better at this that anyone else, and manage the IP (intellectual property). Now, it’s German engineering staff who are running the Chinese production lines.”
The Maldives could develop its own expertise, Kennedy suggests: “the challenges of powering an isolated island in the Maldives are similar to those of a town in the Australian outback,” he notes.
Kennedy sees the future of power generation as working rather like the internet, running as a grid with many small generators feeding into the system rather than the centralised production and distribution of power.
“I’m not a great advocate of large-scale power plant development, solar or otherwise,” Kennedy says. “It risks replicating the mistakes of the past – it’s a Faustian bargain you make, as with Edison: ‘Give us lights in the streets and we’ll give you a regulated monopoly.’”
Because of the pollution profile, plants are also located further from population centres and up to 30 percent of electricity generated is lost in transmission.
“There are new high-voltage DC lines becoming available but uptake is not substantial,” Kennedy says, predicting a future where power generation is controlled by the consumer and with less wasteful transmission.
“Who pays for that bit in lost in the middle?” he asks: “The public purse.”
With 50 percent of the world’s solar installations in Germany, weather is no longer as great a limiting factor of solar technology either, Kennedy says.
The principle obstacle has rather been one of “political will” – which Nasheed will demonstrate when he clambers onto his roof over the next few days to poses for photos with his new PV cells. Clearly a publicity stunt – but nonetheless a bright idea.
Imposing the death penalty, following Shari’a, and harsher prison conditions are the best way forward for solving the increasing violence in Maldivian society, several MPs have stated.
Fares-Maathodaa MP Ibrahim Muththalib said the major problem faced by society today is the decision of the criminal justice system to ignore Shari’a. “We cast aside the Shari’a and adopted man-made sentencing laws”, he said, making today’s violent society possible.
“Instead of being put to death, murderers are allowed to languish in prisons, given the opportunity to get married and to procreate. We cannot stop the violence without stopping such practices. We cannot stop such problems without a death for death policy”, Muththalib told the Majlis.
“I believe that if you impose the death sentence on just two people in this country, there will no longer be anyone left who will kill. If you amputate the hands of two people in this country, there will be no more thieves left. We have to think about how we can establish these principles of Islam”, Muththalib said.
The debate began after an emergency motion tabled by Hoarafushi MP Ahmed Rasheed on Monday to discuss the violent murder of 81-year-old business man, Hussein Manik, on September 27 in Hoarafushi.
“Those who kill should be killed”, Rasheed said, introducing the motion. “We should amend our penal system to ensure that those who endanger the lives of others would be held in solitary confinement for life, and are never eligible for parole”, Rasheed told the Majlis.
If the murderers of Mohamed, or “any criminals of the sort” should ever return to Hoarafushi, he said, he would personally lead a campaign to provide justice to the people of the island. “I will not hesitate, even if it means that I personally get entangled in the law.”
Madaveli MP Mohamed Nazim agreed that the death penalty, as in the Shari’a, was the answer. “Islam is unequivocal that the penalty for death should be death”. The current violence in the country is a consequence of ignoring or violating the teachings of Islam, he said.
“Otherwise, had we maintained the principle of death for death the murderer would not be there to kill again, or to encourage others to kill. The problems we are confronting today is a consequence of ignoring this principle, which would have set an example for the Ummah and the nation’, he said.
Nazim also said there is no need to amend the country’s murder laws, as the death penalty already exists. “I do not see anything in the penal code that says the penalty for murder should be changed to 25 years imprisonment”.
Nazim said that unless and until the death penalty is imposed, as it is stated in the current penal code, the escalating violence in the Maldives could not be stopped.
Thoddoo MP Ali Waheed attributed the increase in violent crime to the lack of proper prisons. “People who should be behind bars are sitting around on the beaches, sucking on butts and all sorts of things – this is the result”, he said.
Drugs, agreed several MPs, were the main cause for the increase in violence in the Maldives. “We know that sometimes people can get intoxicated to such an extent that they become unaware of their own actions. Sometimes murder can be committed,” said Vilifushi area MP Riyaz Rasheed.
MPs themselves should set a good example, and allegations of intoxicating substances being found in their places of residence or their vehicles are not helping matters, Riyaz Rasheed said.
“Pictures of official delegations abroad show them drinking some sort of a yellow liquid”, he said. Unless such ways are amended, there would be no solution to the social problems of the Maldives today, Riyaz Rasheed said.
Maavashu member Abdul Azeez Jamal Abubakr suggested that religious scholars can make the most important contribution to the problems in society. Perjury, he said, is a major problem in Maldivian courts.
The gravity of such an act, as stated in Islam, should be made clear. “It is incumbent upon religious scholars to relay the ominous penalties that await such actions in Islam”, he said.
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