KUALA LUMPUR, June 10 — The PH government will make necessary adjustments to the Malaysian Indian Blueprint initiated by the previous BN government as part of its efforts to assist the country’s B40 category.

Human Resources Minister M. Kulasegaran said the blueprint would not only be reviewed, but also fine-tuned to empower its target community.

"The Committee on Indian Affairs announced by Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad on Wednesday (June 6) will be meeting up in two weeks’ time to discuss the matter, but the review is already underway,” he said during the Indian Entrepreneurship Summit 2018 at Brickfields.

When asked if PH will eventually discard of the blueprint, Kulasegaran said that will not be the case.

"It does not matter who came up with the idea (for the blueprint) be it MIC or Umno, we are not going to throw it in the drain,” he said.

Similarly he expressed his concern for the B40 category, saying that it is necessary to uplift them by encouraging them to take up vocational skills.

"If you look (across the board) at the Chinese community, the Malay community, the Indian community, the Kadazans and Ibans; they have their own share of people with problems.

"To date, I have visited two of the 32 skills training colleges in Malaysia, and urged them to be more proactive in reaching out to the public and getting people to join them instead of merely waiting for government financial assistance,” he said.

Kulasegaran said that many of the skills training institutions were underutilised with as many as 40 per cent of its student capacity left empty, which he said is ‘a sheer colossal waste’.

"I recently spoke to an entrepreneur from India, and was told students who do not necessarily qualify are still taken in for a one-week course. If they are up to the mark, their institution requests the Indian federal government for approval to further teach them. If we can do something like that here, it would be good,” he said.

Regarding the summit, which was attended by some 650 Malaysian Indian small and medium enterprises, Kulasegaran said he is confident they will be able to play a pivotal role in trade and investment with India.

"However some of their counterparts in India usually have different focuses, such as information technology. They are at a higher level compared to us, so we must bridge that level before we can go further,” he said.

The summit encompassed over 12 different industries, ranging from food and beverages to e-commerce. Over half of the attendees were below 40 years of age.