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PRESERVING HERITAGE: One of Mr Dhanabalan's tasks at the National Development Ministry was to chart conservation efforts. In this photo from 1988, he visits shophouses in the Tanjong Pagar conservation area. -- ST FILE PHOTO
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HE HAS been at the helm of five ministries, but the one he enjoyed the most was the National Development Ministry, said Mr S. Dhanabalan.
Speaking at the Pioneer Series talk yesterday, he recalled that he joined that ministry at an exciting time, when land use was the 'in thing'.
He said: 'By the mid-1980s, we had basically housed the population and we could have actually taken a slightly different approach. So by the time I went there in 1987, they were ready for a new approach.'
He was national development minister until 1992.
'Those were exciting days because we began to relook the whole land use in Singapore and ask ourselves how to get the maximum value for different types of land, how to have more exciting designs and so on and so on,' said Mr Dhanabalan, now chairman of Temasek Holdings.
He explained that, before that, the ministry's focus had simply been providing housing, and justifiably so.
So urgent was the need that it had put up public housing estates wherever it could get the land, regardless of what the value of the land was.
'The fact that a location was next to a bungalow area or in front of the sea or in front of a reservoir did not matter: Put the same type of housing everywhere,' he said.
At the National Development Ministry, he also oversaw conservation plans. One such effort that stuck in his mind was the one at Duxton Plain, in Chinatown.
After the area had been boarded up, ready to be redeveloped, a group of officers in the Urban Redevelopment Authority voiced their objections to him.
'I could see straightaway that they were making a lot of sense, because if you were to raze these old buildings down and build, what is the difference between a modern office building here and a modern office building in New York or London or anywhere else,' he recalled.
'I had to agree with them that, though we were very often focused on shortage of land, we could afford to conserve some of these old buildings.'
At the dialogue yesterday, he also looked back fondly on his work as foreign minister from 1980 to 1988.
During those years, Singapore played a leading role in the efforts to win the support of United Nations members for the Cambodian groups that were resisting the government in Phnom Penh that had been installed by neighbouring Vietnam.
'Now I look back and say, well, those years were really important years because we managed to help shape the future of both countries,' he said.
Mr Dhanabalan also led the Culture, Trade and Industry and Community Development ministries.
JEREMY AU YONG
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