Letters to the editor

Dear Stan, This refers to the article "Our safety plea" by Anasuya Keshavan last week's GulfWeekly.

The writer has dealt with one of the most deeply-troubling problems facing Bahrain - bad driving. There is a need to create more awareness of the benefits of traffic discipline by various means such as advertisements on TV, radio, in the written media and on bill-boards as well as staging some open seminars in community centres. Schools and colleges could also take up the road safety challenge by educating students.

There is also a need to revive the whole of the transport scenario in Bahrain.

We need to restructure road infrastructure by building more flyovers, removing roundabouts and replacing them with traffic lights and by introducing a public transport system - preferably a railway network.

These are some of the measures that could be taken up to improve the situation, or else we may have to face even tougher days ahead.

Seturam Aspari, Adliya.

Dear Stan,

Regarding Shilpa's shopping list. As an expat in the kingdom for nearly four years now I'm well aware of the increase in the cost of living. However, when such articles that give weekly surveys are flawed in their data, it doesn't augur too well for the newspaper or the supermarkets.

There's a definite discrepancy in the prices displayed in GulfWeekly and that incurred by shoppers. I have a bill from one supermarket dated December 9 for a few items that I purchased. These three items; rice, washing powder and mineral water amount to a difference of BD0.535 - or a difference of over 11 per cent - between the billed cost and the surveyed figures by Shilpa.

And yes, just to make sure my claim is correct, I cross-checked the prices appearing again in GulfWeekly of December 19. Interestingly, the price difference had gone up even more - now at 11.5 per cent! I trust there's no error at the supermarket as the items are bar-coded unless the till behaves differently sensing a certain Ms Shilpa at the counter?

Dipika Chawla, by email.

Editor's note: Store prices are constantly changing. Shilpa's shopping list gives our readers an accurate account of what the costs were of a trolley-load of items at one particular time during the week. To try to ensure fair play we constantly change the day Shilpa compiles the list.