Exchange rate needs to be stabilized for development of tourism industry

Reported by Phyu Nu Translated and Edited by Win Htut + MYA

For the development of tourism industry of Myanmar, exchange rate needs to be stable in the country, according to travel service entrepreneurs. The number of world tourist arrivals to Myanmar went down in the last two years. However, there has been an increase in the number of world tourists to Myanmar since the end of 2009, it was learnt. Travel service entrepreneurs were in a state of development in the tourism industry at the end of 2010.   Also in 2011, the tourism industry is making progress. However, there are some barriers in improving the tourism industry more than now. “The main barrier is that exchange rate is not stable in the country. For instance, in the time of US$ one dollar that was equivalent with K 1000, if car rental for taking a trip cost K 1 million, it would be convenient with US$ 800. Now, one US$ dollar is K 800. It is necessary to change US$ 1000. There is a 20 percent difference in the exchange rate,” said a travel service entrepreneur. There is approximately 50 percent difference in package tour price due to high costs in car rental, hotel rooms and meals, according to some tour agents. “There are changes in package tour prices for the upcoming season. It is necessary to raise the price rate. Everything in every place is high in price rates. Hotel rate is high and restaurant is also high. When the package tour rate is raised, a tourist said that price rate of everything in our country is higher than other countries. Therefore, he cancelled the package tour. He said only when the price rate is stable, he will come to our country”, said a travel service agent in Yangon. Package tour to Myanmar is usually sold at least six months in advance. It is difficult to fix the package tour prices that have been already sold. The tour company may suffer losses in the change of exchange rate. “It is not easy to raise package tour price. If so, there may be problem. If hotels ask for room charge at least six months in advance, it is not easy to demand the charge from other countries. Even now, bookings are dropping a little”, said a travel marketing manager.

ျမန္မာ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား အတြက္ ပညာသင္ဆု ႏွင့္ Bursary မ်ား ေပးအပ္ရန္ ႀသစေႀတးလ် ႏိုင္ငံ အေနာက္ ပိုင္းရွိ အႀကီးဆံုး တကၠသိုလ္ စီစဥ္

ထူးခြၽန္ထက္ျမက္သည့္ ျမန္မာ ေက်ာင္းသား ေက်ာင္းသူမ်ား အတြက္ ပညာသင္ဆုႏွင့္ Bursary  မ်ားေပး အပ္ခ်ီး ျမႇင့္ရန္ ၾသစေၾတးလ် ႏိုင္ငံ အေနာက္ပုိင္း ရွိအႀကီးဆံုးတကၠသုိလ္ ျဖစ္ေသာ Crutin University က စီစဥ္ထားေၾကာင္း YIUS မွတာ၀န္ ရွိသူတစ္ဦး ျဖစ္သည့္ မခက္ခက္က ေျပာၾကားသည္။

“ဇူလိုင္လကုန္မွာ က်င္းပမယ့္ Curtin University ရဲ႕ ပညာေရး ေဆြးေႏြးပဲြမွာ ထူးခြၽန္ျမန္မာ ေက်ာင္း သားမ်ား အတြက္ ပညာသင္ဆုနဲ႔ Bursary မ်ားေပးအပ္ဖို႔စီစဥ္ထား ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီေဆြးေႏြးပဲြမွာ Curtin Universtiy မွ Ms. Corrinne Li ကုိယ္တုိင္ လာေရာက္ ေဆြးေႏြးမွာပါ။ အေျခခံ ပညာ အထက္တန္း ေအာင္ျမင္ ၿပီးသူမ်ား၊ ဘြဲ႕ႀကိဳဘဲြ႕ရနဲ႔ ေက်ာင္း သား မိဘေတြလည္း အခမဲ့တက္ေရာက္ ႏုိင္ပါတယ္” ဟု မခက္ခက္က ရွင္းျပ သည္။

Curtin University သည္ ၾသစေၾတးလ်ႏုိင္ငံ အေနာက္ပုိင္းရွိ အႀကီးဆံုး တကၠသုိလ္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ႏိုင္ငံ ေပါင္း စံုမွ ေက်ာင္းသားဦးေရ ၄၀,၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္သည္ အဆုိပါ တကၠသုိလ္ ဃောစက် campus ၁၆ ခုတြင္တက္ေရာက္ လ်က္ရွိေၾကာင္း၊အင္ဂ်င္နီယာ ပညာ ရပ္၊ ကြန္ပ်ဴတာ၊ စီးပြားေရးႏွင့္ က်န္းမာေရး သိပံၸ၊ ဗိသုကာပညာ၊ ႐ုပ္ရွင္ႏွင့္ဒီဇုိင္း၊ လူ႔စြမ္းအား အရင္း အျမစ္၊ သူနာျပဳႏွင့္ ဥပေဒပညာရပ္ မ်ားကုိ ပါရဂူအဆင့္ အထိ တက္ ေရာက္သင္ၾကား ႏုိင္ေၾကာင္း သိရ သည္။ အဆုိပါ ေဟာေျပာပဲြကုိ ဇူလုိင္ ၃၀ ရက္ ေန႔လယ္ ၁ နာရီတြင္ ရန္ ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕၊ ကုန္သည္ႀကီးမ်ား ဟုိတယ္၊ ကုန္းေဘာင္ တေကာင္း ခန္းမတြင္ က်င္း ပခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

မိုးသက္ကုိ
The Myanmar Post

Teacher murdered in Pattani

• Published: 3/08/2011 at 11:44 AM
• Online news: Local News

A teacher was killed in a drive-by shooting in Pattani’s Muang district on Wednesday morning, Pol Col Somporn Meesuk, chief of Muang Pattani police station, said.

He said Noppadon Sirimonthon, 50, was on a motorcycle on his way to the Tanyongluloh community school in Muang district when a gunman riding pillion on another motorcycle fired three bullets at him with a 9mm pistol.

Noppadon fell from his bike, the gunman returned and fired four more bullets at him. He died at the spot.
He was the 140th teacher killed in the deep South since the unrest started in 2004.
Police blamed separatist militants.

More than 4,500 people have been kiilled and about 9,000 injured in the southern border provinces since separatist attacks started violence afresh in January 2004.


From: Bangkok Post

ႏြမ္းပါးမႈေၾကာင့္ ရင္ေသြးအား ေရာင္းစားခဲ့သည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္ရွိခဲ့၍ မိဘမဲ့ကေလးမ်ား လက္ခံရာတြင္ သတ္မွတ္အသက္ထက္ ငယ္ေသာ္လည္း လက္ခံေနေသာ ပရဟိတေက်ာင္းရွိေန

Monday, 01 August 2011 06:53 Eleven Media

ဆင္းရဲႏြမ္းပါးျခင္းေၾကာင့္ မိဘရင္းကိုယ္တိုင္ ဆက္လက္ေကြၽးေမြး ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ႏုိင္ျခင္း မရွိေတာ့သည့္အတြက္ မိမိရင္ေသြးအား သူတစ္ပါးသိ႔ု ေရာင္းစားခဲ့သည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္အခ်ဳိ႕ရွိခဲ့သည့္အတြက္ မိဘမဲ့ကေလးမ်ား လက္ခံထိန္းသိမ္း ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သည့္ ပရဟိတေက်ာင္းအခ်ဳိ႕၌ မိဘမဲ့ကေလး မ်ား စတင္လက္ခံရန္ သတ္မွတ္ထားသည့္ အသက္ထက္ငယ္သည့္တိုင္ လက္ခံမႈမ်ားရွိေနေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ရန္ကုန္တိုင္းေဒသႀကီး မရမ္းကုန္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္ အမွတ္(၃)ရပ္ကြက္ ေအာင္သိဒၶိလမ္းရွိ ကုမာရာရာမ ေက်ာင္းတိုက္၌ မိဘႏွစ္ဦးစလံုး ေသဆံုးသြားသည့္ ကေလးမ်ားႏွင့္ မိဘမစံုလင္ေတာ့သည့္ ကေလးငယ္ေပါင္း ၁၂၀ ဦးေက်ာ္ ထိန္းသိမ္းေစာင့္ေရွာက္၍ ပညာသင္ၾကားေပးလ်က္ ရွိေၾကာင္း သိရွိရပါသည္။

“ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းဆိုေတာ့ ေယာက်္ားေလးေတြကိုပဲ လက္ခံပါ တယ္။ သတ္မွတ္ထားတာကေတာ့ အသက္သံုးႏွစ္ကေန ၁၃ႏွစ္အထိေပါ့။ ဒါေပမဲ့ အေၾကာင္းအမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိးေၾကာင့္ အသက္သံုးႏွစ္အထိ ေရာက္ေအာင္ ဘယ္လုိမွမေကြၽးေမြး၊ မေစာင့္ ေရွာက္ႏုိင္ေတာ့ဘူး ဆိုရင္ေတာ့လည္း လက္ခံေပးပါတယ္။ တစ္ခါက ဘုန္းႀကီးတို႔ေက်ာင္းကို ဖေအဆံုးသြားလို႔ မေအျဖစ္သူက အသက္တစ္ႏွစ္ခြဲ ေလာက္ပဲရွိေသးတဲ႔ ကေလးကို ေက်ာင္းလာအပ္ပါတယ္။ အရမ္းငယ္လို႔ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္တုန္းက လက္မခံျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါ ဘူး။ ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွ အဲဒီအမ်ဳိးသမီးကို ျပန္ေတြ႕လို႔ ကေလးအေၾကာင္း ေမးၾကည့္ ျဖစ္တဲ့အခါ အဲဒီကေလးကိုသူမ်ားကို ေရာင္းစားလိုက္တဲ့အေၾကာင္း သိရတယ္။ ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာ ကေလးေတြကို လာအပ္ရင္ အက်ဳိးအေၾကာင္း စံုစမ္းၿပီး လက္ခံျဖစ္ခဲ႔ပါတယ္။ ကေလး တစ္ဦးဆိုရင္ စလက္ခံခဲ့တဲ့အခ်ိန္တုန္းက ဘုန္းႀကီးလက္ထဲမွာ ႏို႔ေတြအန္တဲ့ အရြယ္ေလးပဲ ရွိပါေသးတယ္။ အခုေတာ့ အသက္သံုးႏွစ္ ျပည့္သြားပါၿပီ”ဟု အဆိုပါေက်ာင္းမွ ေက်ာင္းအုပ္ ဆရာေတာ္ ဘဒၵႏၲကုမာရ က မိန္႔ၾကားခဲ့ပါသည္။

“တခ်ဳိ႕ေတြက ကေလးမရလို႔ မိဘမဲ့ကေလးတစ္ေယာက္ေခၚၿပီး ေမြးစားတယ္။ ေမြးစားၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာ ကေလးေတြ ဆက္တိုက္ရလာေတာ့ ေမြးစားထားတဲ့ ကေလးကို အရင္ကလို ဂ႐ုမစိုက္ေတာ့ဘူး။ ကိုယ့္ေသြးသားကိုပဲ တန္ဖိုးထားၿပီး ေမြးစားထားတဲ့ ကေလးကို လွစ္လ်ဴ႐ႈလိုက္ၾကတယ္။ အဲဒီကေလးလည္း ျဖစ္သလိုေနရ စားရနဲ႔သူမ်ား ခိုင္းဖတ္ျဖစ္သြားရတဲ့ ျဖစ္ရပ္ေတြကို ေတြ႕ထားတာေတြလည္း ရွိေတာ့ ဘုန္းႀကီးေမြးထားတဲ့ ကေလးေတြကို ဘယ္သူကုိမွေမြးစား ခြင့္မေပးဘူး။ ေလာကီမွာ ထူးခြၽန္တဲ့ သူေတြကို ေလာကီပညာကို သင္ၾကားေပးမယ္၊၊ ေလာကုတၱရာမွာ ထူးခြၽန္ သူေတြကို ေလာကုတၱရာပညာကို သင္ၾကားမယ္”ဟု ဆက္လက္မိန္႔ၾကားခဲ့သည္။

လက္ရွိ၌ကိုရင္၀တ္ျဖင့္ ၇၁ ပါး ႏွင့္ လူ၀တ္ျဖင့္ ကေလးငယ္ ၃၀ ဦး တို႔ရွိၿပီးရန္ကုန္တိုင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္း ေဒသႀကီး၊ ပဲခူးတိုင္းေဒသ ႀကီးႏွင့္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္တို႔မွ မိဘမဲ့ ကေလးမ်ား အမ်ားဆံုးျဖစ္သည္။
Eleven Media

Mekong awash with drugs

Traffickers look to new routes

• Published: 1/08/2011 at 12:00 AM
• Newspaper section: News

Illegal drug smuggling along the Mekong River is growing rapidly with "mules" wearing special shoes and swimmers who carry guns and bombs.

Along the natural border between Thailand and Laos the US Drug Enforcement Administration is now engaged on a new battlefront to stem the flow of illegal substances.

The US DEA has been working in Thailand for years to counter the upsurge in drugs _ especially methamphetamine, ice (crystal methamphetamine) and cannabis _ smuggled into America from certain Asian nations through Thailand, concentrating mainly along the Burmese border and the Golden Triangle.

"These days, ya ba [methamphetamine] has become a growing problem in the US ... and it is best to tackle the drug problem at its origin,"said Sombat Chao, a US DEA special agent.

The tough crackdown on drug trafficking along the Thai-Burmese border has forced the traffickers to find alternative routes along the Thai-Lao border, said Pol Col Thanachai Phianchang, chief of Sub-Division 10 of the Marine Police Division, who oversees drugs suppression along the Mekong River in Nakhon Phanom, Ubon Ratchathani, Amnat Charoen and Mukdahan provinces.

The drugs are smuggled into Laos first and then spirited across the Mekong River into Thailand, said Pol Col Thanachai who is responsible for tackling the drug smuggling problem along the Thai-Lao border from Mukdahan down to Ubon Ratchathani.

The frequency of drug smuggling from Laos into Thailand is growing quickly. The most common form of smuggling tactics is to put methamphetamine tablets in a pair of shoes modified to hide the drug.

As many as between 1,000 and 2,000 tablets of ya ba can be stuffed in one pair of shoes.

Another drug smuggling tactic is to swim across the river and drop the drugs on the Thai bank.

This tactic is far more difficult to detect and intercept as the traffickers chose isolated wooded areas to drop off the drugs where other traffickers collect them.

The Lao traffickers are very experienced at swimming across the fast-running river, said Pol Col Thanachai, adding that traffickers usually use a plastic oil container to help keep them afloat.

They normally work in teams of at least five members who each get about 5,000 baht to traffic drugs, he said.

Khemarat district of Ubon Ratchathani is seen as a "red zone" for drug trafficking from Laos. This district is opposite Songkhone district of Savannakhet province in Laos.

Ban Tha Prachum, a Lao village in Songkhone district, directly opposite Khemarat district, has become one of the largest spots for the storing of drugs waiting to be trafficked into Thailand, said Pol Col Thanachai.

Pol Lt Col Sanya Phumphothong, head of the 4th marine police checkpoint of Division 10 in Khemarat district, said the fight against drug trafficking there goes on around the clock.

By day, police officers are stationed at the border pass to search travellers upon their arrival for drugs that may have been hidden somewhere in their bodies or luggage.

By night, the marine police are also responsible for intercepting drug traffickers who swim across the river _ a much more difficult task that cannot be accomplished without accurate information from informants.

Equipped with night vision telescopes, the marine police wait in hiding to grab anyone they see swimming across the river.

It's a difficult and dangerous task as these traffickers would rather die than be arrested.

"They no longer carry only a gun but also a bomb. They are well aware that they face the death sentence if arrested, so they may think they have nothing to lose by clashing with the Thai authorities," said Pol Lt Col Sanya.