SINGAPORE — Alcohol should not be sold at all in Little India, even if the riot on Dec 8 last year had not happened, the Chairman of Rowell Court Residents’ Committee said yesterday.

Drunk foreign workers used to cause a mess there by urinating and littering in public places, creating an “unsafe environment” for residents there when they broke into fights on occasion, Mr Lim Herh Kim told the Committee of Inquiry (COI) into the riot.

Urging the COI “not to forget” about residents in the area who have had to “bear the messy and unsightly conditions over the past years”, Mr Lim added that the curbs on alcohol sales and consumption imposed in the area after the riot have brought “very, very huge” improvements.

In the earlier stages of the inquiry, residents of the Little India area had told of the social disamenities they have had to live with. Yesterday, several more echoed the concerns they had faced in the past as a result of drunk foreign workers.

A provision shop owner, who cannot be named, said he had had many “unpleasant encounters” with drunk workers who steal from him.

“I catch most of them in the act of stealing and I would usually warn them not to do it again before letting them go,” he said.

Another shop’s employee also told the COI he had seen fights happening among foreign workers prior to the riot, mostly on Sunday nights.

“They will drink together and get into fights. On one occasion, one of these fights even ended with one person bleeding from the head,” he added.

Mr Lim also told the COI that more foreign workers started visiting Little India after the construction boom several years ago. Although there was a sharp fall in the number of foreign workers in the area in the aftermath of the riot, their numbers are climbing back to pre-riot levels, he added.

All dormitories should have facilities such as money remittance services so as to decentralise the foreign workers, added Mr Lim. However, he said he was not against foreign workers visiting Little India, as long as they were there to shop or remit money and not cause trouble.

Amanda Lee