By Emmanuel Joseph
Senior citizens anxious about the inconvenience of now having to pin their Trident ID cards have been told that the benefits will outweigh the bother.
Minister of Industry, Innovation, Science and Technology, Davidson Ishmael sought to give the assurance amid complaints from elderly Barbadians that they will have to travel to one of the pinning stations across the island to pin their cards in order to ride Transport Board buses for free when the cashless system takes effect.
“I understand the concern. I am in no way, shape, or form oblivious to the discomfort and the inconvenience that some seniors may have by being told that they now have to pin their cards,” he said in an interview with Barbados TODAY.
“In my opinion, even though there is a slight inconvenience of now having to pin cards for those senior citizens who did not, I believe the benefits that will accrue to them are going to outweigh the slight inconvenience.”
Acknowledging that residents had been previously told they did not have to pin the new IDs when they collected them, although they were encouraged to do so, Ishmael said the option was given because of the resistance to the move.
“We knew that as new services were rolled out, that at some point in time [we] would have services that the general population would need to utilise and we knew that the chip and pin technology would be able to allow them to do that. So, at the beginning of this project, if you recall, we were encouraging people to pin the card at the point of collecting it. Of course, we had a lot of persons then raising issues with ‘why do I have to pin my ID card, etcetera’. We then indicated that persons had the option of pinning the card if they so desired.
“What we are seeing today now is that as we have moved forward. We have progressed in our development of different services and the Transport Board has implemented its cashless transportation system…. You would recall that at the beginning of our rollout of the Trident ID, we said that one of the first uses would have been to allow persons to be able to travel using the ID card on the Transport Board buses.”
The minister argued that this latest development, therefore, should not have come as a surprise to anyone.
“I get it. I understand the inconvenience. We are not in any way saying that there is not going to be a slight inconvenience. But what we are doing is that we are opening centres in every parish across the island,” he said.
“We are opening centres at the post offices so that the same senior citizens, the same pensioners who go and get their pension cheques at their convenience, can now have access to pinning stations at the post offices during the day and they can go and do the pinning of their cards at those locations. We are trying to make it as convenient to each and every member of the public.”
Ishmael believes that once seniors start using the pinned Trident IDs, they will appreciate the ease and convenience of travelling on Transport Board buses.
emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb
