As students gear for fare hike protests

“What in the term ‘social service’ does the DOTC not understand?”

This was how Terry Ridon, national chairperson of the League of Filipino Students described the planned fare increases in the MRT and the LRT which the Department of Transportation and Communication is dead-set to impose in the soonest possible time.

He said that the planned increases are a reflection of the general economic framework of public-private partnerships set by Pres. Benigno Simeon Aquino III in his State of the Nation Address.

“The values and ideology set by public=private partnerships will change the way government social services like the MRT/LRT shall be run – less of a public service, more of a profit-driven enterprise.”

He said such pro-big business values and policies in government services are dangerous as it would mean that government shall now reject the indispensability of full government subsidies in making social services accessible to our people.

“Just as education, healthcare and agrarian reform deserve full subsidies from government, so does government-run public transport system like the MRT and LRT.”

He said allowing fare increases to happen and accepting the DOTC’s justification that such services are undeserving of subsidies would further justify the decreasing of subsidies even in traditionally subsidy-dependent services like education and healthcare.

“Given the DOTC’s justification that it is unfair for all taxpayers to subsidize the daily personal benefit of a few MRT/LRT riders, such flawed logic may thus be used by government to allow public hospitals to charge more than its present rates from indigent patients, and for state universities and colleges to demand higher tuition from poor but deserving students.”

He said that under such an economic framework set by the President, social services are not now safeguarded as matter of public right, but a mere privilege available only to those who can pay.

“And if such is the ‘daand matuwid’ that is promised by the new administration, it might soon be no different from the discredited regime it replaced.”

The LFS vowed to hold petition-signing drives in MRT and LRT stations and picket protests in DOTC, LRT and MRT offices next week.