From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

13. Greening Singapore
On my first visit to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 1976, there were
spittoons in the meeting rooms where they greeted us. Some of the Chinese
leaders actually used them. When Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore in 1978, we
provided a Ming blue and white spittoon. Although we placed it next to his chair
in the conference room, he did not use it. He might have noticed that Chinese
Singaporeans did not spit. On my next visit to Beijing in 1980, I saw that
spittoons had been removed from the Great Hall. A few years later, when I gave
dinner in Singapore to Gu Mu, a state councillor in charge of economics, I
mentioned that they had stopped using spittoons in the Great Hall of the People.
He chuckled and said they had removed them from the meeting rooms but still
used them in their offices – it was too old a habit to eradicate.
I had introduced anti-spitting campaigns in the 1960s. But even in the ’80s
some taxi drivers would spit out of their car windows and some people were still
spitting in markets and food centres. We persisted and disseminated the message
through schools and the media that spitting spread diseases such as tuberculosis.
Now people seldom see spitting in public. We are an immigrant people who
have uprooted ourselves from our ancient homelands and are prepared to
abandon old habits to make good in a new country. This progress encouraged me
to alter other bad habits.
After independence, I searched for some dramatic way to distinguish
ourselves from other Third World countries. I settled for a clean and green
Singapore. One arm of my strategy was to make Singapore into an oasis in
Southeast Asia, for if we had First World standards then businessmen and
tourists would make us a base for their business and tours of the region. The
physical infrastructure was easier to improve than the rough and ready ways of
the people. Many of them had moved from shanty huts with a hole in the ground
or a bucket in an outhouse to high-rise apartments with modern sanitation, but
their behaviour remained the same. We had to work hard to be rid of littering,
noise nuisance and rudeness, and get people to be considerate and courteous.

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We started from a low base. In the 1960s long queues would form at our
“Meet the People” sessions, clinics where ministers and MPs helped solve the
problems of their constituents. The unemployed, many accompanied by wives
and children, would plead for jobs, taxi or hawker licences, or permission to sell
food in school tuckshops. These were the human faces behind the unemployment
statistics. Thousands would sell cooked food on the pavements and streets in
total disregard of traffic, health or other considerations. The resulting litter and
dirt, the stench of rotting food and the clutter and obstructions turned many parts
of the city into slums.
Many became “pirate taxi” drivers, unlicensed and without insurance cover,
exploited by businessmen who rented them junk private cars. They charged
slightly more than the buses and much less than licensed taxis. They stopped
without signalling to pick up or drop off passengers at will and were a menace to
other road users. Hundreds, eventually thousands of pirate taxis clogged our
streets and destroyed bus services.
For years we could not clean up the city by removing these illegal hawkers
and pirate taxi drivers. Only after 1971, when we had created many jobs, were
we able to enforce the law and reclaim the streets. We licensed the cooked food
hawkers and moved them from the roads and pavements to properly constructed
nearby hawker centres, with piped water, sewers and garbage disposal. By the
early ’80s we had resettled all hawkers. Some were such excellent cooks that
they became great tourist attractions. A few became millionaires who drove to
work in their Mercedes Benz and employed waiters. It was the enterprise, drive
and talent of such people that made Singapore. Pirate taxi drivers were banished
from the roads only after we had reorganised bus services and could provide
them with alternative employment.
The city became scruffy while we were in Malaysia, after two communal
riots in July and September 1964. Morale went down and discipline slackened.
Two incidents stirred me to action. One morning in November 1964 I looked
across the Padang from my office window at City Hall to see several cows
grazing on the Esplanade! A few days later a lawyer driving on a main road just
outside the city hit a cow and died. The Indian cowherds were bringing their
cows into the city to graze on the roadsides and on the Esplanade itself. I called a
meeting of public health officers and spelt out an action plan to solve this
problem. We gave owners of cows and goats a grace period until 31 January
1965, after which all such stray animals would be taken to the abattoir and the
meat given to welfare homes. By December 1965 we had seized and slaughtered

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53 cows. Very quickly, all cattle and goats were back in their sheds.
To achieve First World standards in a Third World region, we set out to
transform Singapore into a tropical garden city. I had been planting trees at the
opening of community centres, during my visits to various establishments and at
traffic roundabouts to commemorate the completion of a road junction. Some
thrived, many did not. Revisiting a community centre, I would find a new
sapling, just transplanted for my visit. I concluded that we needed a department
dedicated to the care of trees after they had been planted. I established one in the
ministry of national development.
After some progress, I met all senior officers of the government and statutory
boards to involve them in the “clean and green” movement. I recounted how I
had visited almost 50 countries and stayed in nearly as many official
guesthouses. What impressed me was not the size of the buildings but the
standard of their maintenance. I knew when a country and its administrators
were demoralised from the way the buildings had been neglected – washbasins
cracked, taps leaking, water-closets not functioning properly, a general
dilapidation and, inevitably, unkempt gardens. VIPs would judge Singapore the
same way.
We planted millions of trees, palms and shrubs. Greening raised the morale
of people and gave them pride in their surroundings. We taught them to care for
and not vandalise the trees. We did not differentiate between middle-class and
working-class areas. The British had superior white enclaves in Tanglin and
around Government House that were neater, cleaner and greener than the
“native” areas. That would have been politically disastrous for an elected
government. We kept down flies and mosquitoes, and cleaned up smelly drains
and canals. Within a year there was a distinct spruceness of public spaces.
Perseverance and stamina were needed to fight old habits: people walked
over plants, trampled on grass, despoiled flowerbeds, pilfered saplings or parked
bicycles or motorcycles against the larger ones, knocking them down. And it was
not just the poorer people who were the offenders. A doctor was caught
removing from a central road divider a newly planted valuable Norfolk Island
pine which he fancied for his garden. To overcome the initial indifference of the
public, we educated their children in schools by getting them to plant trees, care
for them and grow gardens. They brought the message home to their parents.
Nature did not favour us with luscious green grass as it has New Zealand and

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Ireland. An Australian plant expert and a New Zealand soil expert came in 1978
at my request to study our soil conditions. Their report caught my interest and I
asked to see them. They explained that Singapore was part of the equatorial
rainforest belt, with strong sunshine and heavy rainfall throughout the year.
When trees were cut down, heavy rainfall would wash off the topsoil and leach
the nutrients. To have grass green and lush, we had to apply fertilisers regularly,
preferably compost, which would not be so easily washed away, and lime,
because our soil was too acid. The Istana curator tested this on our lawns.
Suddenly the grass became greener. We had all school and other sports fields
and stadiums similarly treated. The bare patches around the goal posts with
sparse, tired-looking yellow grass were soon carpeted green. Gradually, the
whole city greened up. A visiting French minister, a guest at our National Day
reception in the 1970s, was ecstatic as he congratulated me in French; I did not
speak it, but understood the word “verdure”. He was captivated by the greenness
of the city.
Most countries in Asia then paid little or no attention to greening. That
Singapore was different, and had taken tough action against stray cattle, made
news in the American 
Look
magazine of November 1969. Enthused after a visit,
Hong Kong’s director of information services announced that he would put up a
two-year anti-litter campaign based on our experience.
For the Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference set for mid-January
1971, I rallied our officials to make that extra effort and give visitors a better
impression of Singapore. We briefed the service industry, including
shopkeepers, taxi drivers and workers in hotels and restaurants, to exert
themselves to be courteous and friendly. They responded and the feedback from
visiting prime ministers, presidents and their staff was good. Encouraged by this,
the tourist promotion board launched a campaign for courteous and gracious
service from salesmen and others in the service trade. I intervened. It was absurd
if our service personnel were courteous to tourists but not to Singaporeans. I got
the ministry of defence in charge of national servicemen, the ministry of
education with half a million students under its care and the National Trades
Union Congress with several hundred thousand workers to spread the message
that courtesy must be our way of life, to make Singapore a pleasanter place for
ourselves, quite apart from the tourist trade.
Our biggest dividend was when Asean leaders decided to compete in the
greening of their cities. Malaysia’s Dr Mahathir, who had stayed at the Istana
Villa in the 1970s, asked me how I got the Istana lawns to be so green. When he

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became prime minister, he greened up Kuala Lumpur. President Suharto pushed
greening in Jakarta, as did President Marcos in Manila and Prime Minister
Thanin in Bangkok, all in the late 1970s. I encouraged them, reminding them
that they had a greater variety of trees and a similar favourable climate.
No other project has brought richer rewards to the region. Our neighbours
have tried to out-green and out-bloom each other. Greening was positive
competition that benefited everyone – it was good for morale, for tourism and
for investors. It was immensely better that we competed to be the greenest and
cleanest in Asia. I can think of many areas where competition could be harmful,
even deadly.
On the first Sunday in November 1971, we launched an annual Tree Planting
Day that involved all MPs, community centres and their leaders. We have not
missed a single tree planting day since. Saplings planted in November need
minimum watering as the rainy season begins then.
Because our own suitable varieties of trees, shrubs and creepers were
limited, I sent research teams to visit botanical gardens, public parks and
arboreta in the tropical and subtropical zones to select new varieties from
countries with a similar climate in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Central
America. They brought back many free-flowering plants and trees to test on our
soil and climate. Unfortunately beautiful free-flowering trees from the Caribbean
will not flower in Singapore because we do not have their cool winters. Those
from India and Burma seldom flowered in Singapore because they needed the
annual long dry season between monsoons of their native habitat. Our botanists
brought back 8,000 different varieties and got some 2,000 to grow in Singapore.
They propagated the successful sturdy ones and added variety to our greenery.
A key implementer of my green policy was an able officer, Wong Yew
Kwan, a Malaysian trained in silviculture who had intended to work for rubber
and oil palm plantations in Malaysia. He brought his expertise to bear on the
problems of roadside trees, shrubs and other greenery and created parks and
park-connectors in Singapore. I showered him with memos, endless wish lists
that he assiduously responded to, successfully implementing many of them. His
successor, Chua Sian Eng, was an agriculturist who made himself a tree expert
and kept up the good work.
Every time I return to Singapore after a few weeks’ absence, and see the
trees, palms, green grass and free-flowering shrubs as I drive along East Coast
Parkway from the airport into the city, my spirits rise. Greening is the most cost-
effective project I have launched.

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One compelling reason to have a clean Singapore is our need to collect as
much as possible of our rainfall of 95 inches a year. I put Lee Ek Tieng, a civil
engineer, then the head of the Anti-Pollution Unit, in charge of a plan to dam up
all our streams and rivers. The plan took about 10 years to implement. He had to
ensure that all sewage, sullage and other soiled water from homes and factories
emptied into the sewers. Only clean rainwater run-off from the roofs, gardens
and open spaces was allowed into the open drains that flowed into dammed-up
rivers. By 1980 we were able to provide some 63 million gallons of water per
day, about half of our daily water consumption then.
My most ambitious plan was to clean up the Singapore River and Kallang
Basin and bring fish back to the rivers. When I first proposed it in February
1977, many, especially industrialists, asked, “Why clean up? The Rochore Canal
(which flows into Kallang Basin) and the Singapore River have always been
filthy; part of Singapore’s heritage!” I would have none of this. They smelt
putrid. A blind telephone operator in Choo’s law office knew when his bus was
approaching Singapore River by its distinctive stench. Trade effluents were
responsible for half of our water pollution problem. Every stream, culvert and
rivulet had to be free from pollution. Teh Cheang Wan, then chief executive
officer of the HDB, quipped, “It will be a lot cheaper for you to buy fish and put
them in the river every week.”
Lee Ek Tieng was not deterred. He had worked closely with me and was
confident of my support. Cleaning up the Singapore River and Kallang Basin
was a massive engineering job. He laid underground sewers for the whole island,
which was especially difficult in the heavily built-up city centre. We moved
people from some 3,000 backyard and cottage industries and resettled them in
industrial estates with sullage traps for oil and other wastes. Since the founding
of Singapore in 1819, lighters and open barges had plied the river. Their workers
lived, cooked and did their ablutions on these vessels. They had to move to Pasir
Panjang on the west coast, while boatyards along the Kallang River were
relocated at Tuas and the Jurong River. Five thousand street vendors of cooked
food and market produce had to go into properly designed centres. Accustomed
to doing business on the road rent-free and easily accessible to customers, they
resisted moving to centres where they would have to pay rent and water and
electricity charges. We gently but firmly moved them and subsidised their
rentals. Even so, some failed.
We phased out the rearing of over 900,000 pigs on 8,000 farms because pig

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waste polluted our streams. We also shut down many food-fish ponds, leaving
only 14 in agrotechnology parks and a few for leisure fishing. Food-fish are now
farmed offshore in shallow net-cages in the Straits of Johor as well as in deep-
sea net-cages off deeper waters near our southern islands.
We had a resettlement unit to deal with the haggling and bargaining involved
in every resettlement, whether of hawkers, farmers or cottage industrialists. They
were never happy to be moved or to change their business. This was a hazardous
political task which unless carefully and sympathetically handled would lose us
votes in the next election. A committee of officials and MPs whose
constituencies were affected helped to limit the political fallout.
Resettling farmers was toughest. We paid compensation based on size of
farm structures, the cemented area of open space within their farm holding and
the number of fruit trees and fish ponds. As our economy thrived, we increased
the amount, but even the most generous payment was not enough. Older farmers
did not know what to do with themselves and their compensation money. Living
in flats, they missed their pigs, ducks, chickens, fruit trees and vegetable plots
which had provided them with free food. Fifteen to 20 years after being resettled
in HDB new towns, many still voted against the PAP. They felt the government
had destroyed their way of life.
In November 1987 I found great satisfaction in going by launch up a clean
Kallang Basin and Singapore River, until then the open sewers of Singapore. At
the Clean River ceremony I presented the men responsible with gold medals to
commemorate the achievement. We later built eight new estuarine reservoirs,
several of them open for boating and recereational fishing. The yield of potable
water rose to 120 million gallons per day. Behind each successful project was a
dedicated and able officer, trained in that discipline, and applying himself to our
unique problems. There would have been no clean and green Singapore without
Lee Ek Tieng. I could spell out broad conceptual objectives, but he had to work
out the engineering solutions. He later became head of the civil service.
In 1993 Winsemius went fishing on the Singapore River and had the
satisfaction of catching a fish. Clean rivers made possible a different quality of
life. The value and use of land rose significantly, especially in the city and at
sites abutting rivers and canals. We bought sand from Indonesia to lay a beach
along the banks of the Kallang Basin where people sunbathe and water-ski
today. Waterside high-rise condominiums have taken over from unsightly small
shipyards. For those who remember the Singapore River when it was a sewer, it
is a dream to walk along its banks. Shophouses and warehouses have been

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restored and turned into cafés, restaurants, shops and hotels, and people wine
and dine alfresco by the river or on traditional Chinese barges parked alongside.
You can tell how polluted a city is by its greenery. Where exhaust fumes
from poorly maintained cars, buses and diesel lorries are excessive, the shrubs,
covered in black soot particles, wilt and die. In Boston during the autumn of
1970 I was surprised to see queues of cars heading for gas stations. My driver
explained that it was the last day for cars to renew their licence for the following
year, and they had first to be tested and certified roadworthy by authorised gas
stations. I decided to set up an Anti-Pollution Unit as part of my office. We had
monitoring instruments placed along busy roads to measure dust particle and
smoke density and the concentration of sulphur dioxide emitted by motor
vehicles. Other cities had clean and green suburbs that gave their residents
respite from city centres. Singapore’s size forced us to work, play and reside in
the same small place, and this made it necessary to preserve a clean and gracious
environment for rich and poor alike.
In the heart of Jurong Town, surrounded by hundreds of factories, we built a
bird park in 1971. Without strict anti-pollution standards, these birds from the
world over could not have thrived as they are doing. We also had greening in
Jurong itself. All factories had to landscape their grounds and plant trees before
they could commence operations.
Although we have solved our domestic air pollution, the whole of Singapore
and the surrounding region was covered in haze from forest fires in Sumatra and
Borneo in 1994 and 1997. Plantation companies, after extracting the valuable
timber, set fire to the rest of the forest to clear the land for oil palms and other
crops. In the dry season, the fires raged for months. In mid-1997 a thick
poisonous haze spread over Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines,
causing airports to close and thousands to fall ill.
I also had to deal with noise pollution which the old Singapore suffered from
vehicles, pile-driving on construction sites, loudspeakers from open-air
entertainment and television sets and radios. Slowly and methodically, we
brought the decibels down by enforcing new rules. Noisiest and most dangerous
was the custom of firing crackers during the Chinese New Year season. Many,
especially children, suffered serious burns and injuries. Whole squatter villages
of wooden buildings had been burnt down. After a massive fire on the last day of
the 1970 Chinese New Year festivities, when five persons were killed and many

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injured, I stopped this age-old Chinese tradition of firing crackers, making it an
offence. Nevertheless, two years later, two unarmed policemen were brutally
attacked when they tried to prevent a group from firing crackers. We took it one
step further and banned the importation of firecrackers altogether. When we live
in high-rises 10 to 20 storeys high, incompatible traditional practices had to stop.
In the 1960s the pace of urban renewal had quickened. We went through a
phase when we recklessly demolished the old run-down city centre to build
anew. By late 1970 we felt disquiet over the speed at which we were erasing our
past, so we set up a Preservation of Monuments Board in 1971 to identify and
preserve buildings of historic, traditional, archaeological, architectural or artistic
interest, and civic, cultural and commercial buildings significant in Singapore’s
history. The buildings designated include old Chinese temples, Indian temples,
mosques, Anglican and Catholic churches, Jewish synagogues, 19th century
traditional Chinese architecture and former colonial government offices in the
old civic centre. The pride of the colonial past was Government House, once the
seat of British governors, now the Istana where the president and prime minister
have their offices.
We tried to retain Singapore’s distinctive character and identity to remind us
of our past. Fortunately we had not demolished the historic districts of Kampong
Glam, the historical seat of Malay royalty, Little India, Chinatown and the old
warehouses along the Singapore River.
From the 1970s, to save the young from a nasty and dangerous addiction, we
banned all advertising for cigarettes. Progressively, we banned smoking from all
public places – lifts, buses, MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) trains and stations and,
eventually, all air-conditioned offices and restaurants. I followed the Canadians
who blazed the trail. The Americans were far behind because their tobacco lobby
was too powerful.
We had a “Smoke-Free Week” every year. As part of this campaign, I
recounted on television my personal experience, how I used to smoke about 20
cigarettes a day until 1957, when after three weeks of campaigning in the City
Council election I lost my voice and could not even thank the voters. Since I
could not keep my addiction within limits, I stopped smoking altogether. I

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suffered for a fortnight. In the 1960s I became allergic to tobacco smoke and
disallowed smoking in my air-conditioned office and the cabinet room. Within a
few years most ministers had given up smoking except two chain-smokers, Raja
and Eddie Barker. They would slip out of cabinet meetings for about ten minutes
to light up and satisfy their craving on the open veranda.
It is a relentless battle that we are still waging. The American tobacco
industry’s wealth and advertising power make it a formidable enemy. The
number of older smokers has decreased but the young, including girls, are still
being trapped into addiction. We cannot afford to lose this battle.
A ban on chewing gum brought us much ridicule in America. As early as
1983, the minister for national development had proposed that we ban it because
of the problems caused by spent chewing gum inserted into keyholes and
letterboxes and on lift buttons. Spitting of chewing gum on floors and common
corridors increased the cost of cleaning and damaged cleaning equipment. At
first I thought a ban too drastic. Then vandals stuck chewing gum onto the
sensors of the doors of our MRT trains and services were disrupted. I was no
longer prime minister but Prime Minister Goh and his other colleagues decided
on a ban in January 1992. Several ministers who had studied in American
universities recounted how the underside of lecture theatre seats were filthy with
chewing gum stuck to them like barnacles. The ban greatly reduced the nuisance,
and after stocks in the shops had been removed the gum problem at MRT
stations and trains was negligible.
Foreign correspondents in Singapore have no big scandals of corruption or
grave wrongdoings to report. Instead they reported on the fervour and frequency
of these “do good” campaigns, ridiculing Singapore as a “nanny state”. They
laughed at us. But I was confident we would have the last laugh. We would have
been a grosser, ruder, cruder society had we not made these efforts to persuade
our people to change their ways. We did not measure up as a cultivated, civilised
society and were not ashamed to set about trying to become one in the shortest
time possible. First we educated and exhorted our people. After we had
persuaded and won over a majority, we legislated to punish the wilful minority.
It has made Singapore a more pleasant place to live in. If this is a “nanny state”,
I am proud to have fostered one.

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