Thai government to construct riverside floodwalls

BANGKOK, Feb 24 (TNA) Thai Deputy Prime Minister Kittirat Na-Ranong says that the government will urgently construct riverside flood prevention walls funded by a state budget of at least 30 billion baht. Kittirat, who is also Finance Minister concurrently, acknowledged that the urgent construction of the flood prevention walls along local rivers to replace temporary sandbag embankments used during Thailand's flooding crisis late last year, followed the Constitutional Court's ruling on February 22 that two executive decrees giving the green light for a new borrowing of some 350 billion baht by the government and for a transfered debt from the Financial Institutions Development Fund (FIDF) to the Bank of Thailand (BOT) are constitutional. Kittirat said, as the Thai government now needs not to shoulder the burden of the FIDF's 60-billion-baht debt a year, the administration will have more budget left for developing the country. According to the deputy premier, another state budget of about 60 billion baht will be used for the implementation of a floodway initiative, with some two million rai or 800,000 acres of land to be used as water retention areas, and for an official compensation to be paid for residents in the targeted areas. The Thai deputy premier told journalists that the government has already conducted a survey and initially found an appropriate 1.5-million rai or 600,000 acres plots of land to be served under the floodway project.(TNA)