Tag: Goa

Amita Kanekar, Popular Essays

Viksit Goa, but not Goans

Old trees cut, at the cost of micro-climate, global warming, and wildlife collapse. Schools closed, at the cost of children’s futures. Markets closed and shop shutters down, at the cost of vulnerable livelihoods. Street dogs disappeared and roadside cattle driven away, at the cost of their wellbeing, even lives. Normal traffic, public bus services, and even emergency traffic seriously affected, at the cost of time, money, health, and worse.

What does this sound like? Evacuation before some disaster, or preparation for some attack? No, no, just the Goa government getting ready for a one-day visit of the country’s Prime Minister (PM). And, in their usual commitment to the all-important tourist population, they announced that (amidst all the chaos and destruction, and whatever happens to anyone else) anyone going to the airport or railway station would not be inconvenienced.

Can the state government explain why trees had to be cut and street dogs evicted for the prime-ministerial visit? And how children attending school would harm the PM? Yes, the traffic on the roads might be higher as a result, but children going to school surely counts as essential traffic? Besides, many of them would be travelling in school buses, thus creating the least chaos when it comes to traffic. If anybody should have been asked to stay at home to avoid creating traffic snarls, one would surely start with the PM himself and his unending cavalcade of vehicles. But you can’t expect Chief Minister Pramod Sawant to understand this simple fact, not when he himself has hiked the size of his own entourage – to ensure he creates more trouble for everyone else on the road, because that, apparently, proves how important he is.

What was the purpose of the PM’s visit? Is talking about Viksit Goa (Developed Goa) so important that it justifies the loss of trees and wildlife, dogs and cattle, income and education, not to mention the huge amounts of public money that gets spent in ferrying a VVVIP around the country? Because talking is exactly what he did here, besides completely unnecessary and vainglorious activities like inaugurations and laying of foundation stones, most of them apparently online. Goa, he declared, will be developed as a destination for conference tourism; its connectivity improved to make it a logistics hub, and, through the establishments of many institutions, also an educational hub. The promise of a super-duper hub of tourism, logistics, and education – that was his basic message. Seriously, couldn’t this have been said from Delhi?

Especially since most Goans are hardly going to benefit from this Viksit hub. The PM praised the state government for implementing all central schemes brilliantly – yes, the same state government which, after spending tens of thousands of crores of our money on infrastructure, and destroying the environment wholesale in the process, is simultaneously failing on every front when it comes to basic infrastructure for local communities. This state government claims that Goa is ‘har ghar jal’ (every house has water, one presumes), when severe water shortages are becoming common in many Goan villages, right from Pernem to the north, to Quepem in the south, even as projects for ‘villas with swimming pool’ are cleared at lightning speed all over. Similarly, this self-proclaimed ‘Open Defecation Free’ state has umpteen families (Goan families, not the vilified migrants) all over the state who still do not have toilets at home despite repeated applications; not to mention a capital city where the municipal corporation’s (CCP) public sweepers and garbage collectors are told by their own supervisors to ‘do it behind a tree’.

As for road infrastructure, where does one start? Everywhere you look, local communities are up in arms against the grabbing of their land by prestigious national road projects which, according to the Chief Minister himself, have already cost the public a whopping Rs 20,000 crores. With the government now slashing taxes on luxury cars, while ignoring the decrepit state of public transport, we know who the new highways are being planned for. But when it comes to roads actually needed by the people, where is the government? Goa had no road good enough for an ambulance to approach the house of a Goan man, Mr. Paik Gaonkar, in the tribal village of Kazugotta in Sanguem, after he suffered a heart attack on Republic Day last month. And no basic ambulance service either. Not only did the ambulance have to halt 2.5 kilometres away from Gaonkar’s home, the vehicle itself was not equipped with even a stretcher, leave aside other life-saving equipment. The grievously-ill man was carried to the ambulance in a blanket on the shoulders of a family-member, and had passed away by the time he reached the hospital.

Kazugotta is not the only tribal village in Goa which still lacks motorable roads, say tribal activists, who have demanded that the government explain where the tribal welfare budget of hundreds of crores of rupees has gone. A new road had actually been sanctioned in Kazugotta for Rs 4 crores in 2013, but was never completed, despite repeated complaints by locals. When villagers recently took up the issue with the authorities, they were told that the road would now cost 10 crores, and that it was hardly justified to spend that much money on a village of ‘just’ 150 people.

So, twenty thousand crores are available for roads that locals do NOT want, but not even ten crores for a road that people desperately need. Goa also has helicopter cabs for the super-rich to hop from spot to spot, but no emergency medical services for locals. This is what CM Pramod Sawant apparently means by ‘purna swaraj’ or complete freedom – complete freedom for corporates destroying Goa’s environment, for tourists consuming Goa, and for super-rich Goans like those who killed 3 people in Banastarim with their luxury SUV.

Goa’s connectivity is being improved, so the PM says. And well he might. We cannot provide a basic road or ambulance service to a village of 150 Goans, but we are happy to hammer all normal life for the super-fast passage of his cavalcade, which incidentally always includes a top-quality ambulance – or two – whether he travels by road or air. This is actually a preview of the Viksit super-hub that Goa is becoming even as we speak – international-quality connectivity for the moneyed and powerful, and disconnected locals.

 

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 10 February 2024)

Popular Essays

What Will be the Next New Bottle for the ‘Development’ Wine?

By Albertina Almeida

 

When the news first broke out about proposed amendments to the Goa Land Development and Building Regulation, 2010, it seemed like a Déjà vu: one because much of the so-called development envisaged through those amendments had already been resisted many years ago, and therefore not carried out. This time around it had come in a new bottle that was called Proposed Amendments to the Goa Land and Building Constructions Regulations, 2010.

In the late 1990’s, the Tourism Department of the Government of Goa, had proposed to acquire land under the then Land Acquisition Act for golf courses. This had been spotted by way of an advertisement in national newspapers. It must be noted that at that time, none of the national newspapers had a Goa edition. When an application for information was made to the Department of Tourism, Government of Goa, asking what is the area of land proposed to be acquired for each of the golf courses proposed to be set up, how the water requirements of each of the golf courses was to be met, a copy of the environment impact assessment report as regard each of the proposed golf courses, the response was 6.40 lakhs at Verna Plateau and 10 lakh square metres at Naqueri and Quittol villages in Betul, and that the promoters were supposed to make their own arrangements for water, and further that the golf courses would be ‘improving’ the sites which are both rocky and barren.

Inherent in this reply of June 1993, was a vision of development that did not look at people’s participation in decision making processes, or at the actualisation of the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution of India, or at development from the perspective of the people and the users and uses such as land grazing that the land had been put to over long long years. For the struggle to fructify, it then took several actions and lobbying, drawing lessons from other Asian countries like Thailand, where such golf courses had already been set up, and solidarities with and from movements at the international level, to enable an understanding of just how golf courses were disastrous for the environment, apart from the local issues of land use and availability.

The water bodies, with the toxic chemicals that would be ingested for the lawns, and the water-guzzlers that golf courses were, was critical knowledge for rejecting the golf courses. The Village Panchayat of Verna and its gram sabha, at that time, strongly resisted the golf course at Verna, based on information of environmental impacts of golf courses which was provided to them, and the knowledge that a golf course was coming up in their area (from information given by the Tourism Department to Bailancho Saad). The entire momentum with an all-Goa movement against golf courses, finally compelled the Government to retreat on its golf course plan. Yet in 2022, the Government seems to have come around a full circle, and proposed golf courses, which means that they would now descend into the fields, as the fields are almost the only big flatlands left, or were they thinking of flattening the rocky areas? Further, they now said they would only use organic fertilizer, without explaining that a 6-inch thick layer is required during the period of one year, which would mean 75000 to 112500 cubic metres of organic manure each year. Would they have been importing this quantum of manure? Pray, what will be the next new avatar of the golf course in the name of development?

Similarly, the Goa SEZ policy 2006, provided that the State Government will take appropriate steps to declare the SEZs as Industrial Townships to enable the SEZs to function as self-governing, autonomous municipal bodies.   Hence the Government visualised industrial townships in which the 73rd and 74th Amendments would be given a go by, and the townships were in fact like gated areas, whose operation could not be questioned by the people or the local self-government bodies, and would/could, in effect, have become the preserve of the elite descending in Goa from India and abroad. Apart from the fact that the employment it would generate would require importing of labour from other parts of India seriously resulting in breach of Goa’s carrying capacity in terms of land, water and other natural resources, and amenities. Therefore, again civil society groups bandied together to oppose the SEZs, as a result of which the Government of the day led by then Chief Minister Digambar Kamat assured that the SEZ policy would be withdrawn and eventually his cabinet formerly withdrew the same in June 2009. There was also a bio-technology policy under which the biotechnology parks were supposed to be SEZ like. Presumably that also stood withdrawn to the extent of being SEZ like?

Prior to that, the industrial estates, which are also outside the bounds of Village Panchayats, were also set up on the pretext of providing employment and generating revenue. Is there any study of how much employment these industrial estates have generated and for whom, considering that the fields that were forcibly acquired were under cultivation by the local tribal community? Again, now in 2022, in respect of the proposed amendments to the Land and Building Regulations, the Chief Town Planner was quoted in the press as saying that the amendment would have helped create a lot of employment opportunities for Goans. This time in 2022, the proposal had assumed the garb of film cities, film studios and golf courses, and mega-farmhouses (obviously in fields, silly as it may sound) to prepare for mega industry read as huge corporates, to now take over the last bastion of Goa’s environment, the fields.

How long will the successive Governments keep rehashing the same plans and the same development model? How long the same wine in a different bottle? The Government must get the message loud and clear that people’s voices have to be heard through gram sabhas and local self Government bodies, when going to the drawing board, and that the technical experts (such as architects, economists, lawyers. environmental engineers), and representatives of civil society must be aids in this process. At no stage, must anyone be in contravention of the Constitution of India as is, according to which diversity of genders, of profession of religion, of abilities, of occupations and professions, must be able to reside and live shoulder to shoulder with equality and with dignity, while maintaining inter-generational equity. Not simply the most recent movement has been called Goenchea Fudlea Pidge Khatir (For the Future Generation of Goa).

Popular Essays

The (real) scandal of government employment

By Amita Kanekar

 

So Goa is among the states with the highest number of government employees per capita of its population – as per the census report of government employees from the state government’s department of planning and statistics. The finding was reported by the press in shocked tones. There is one government employee, they said disgustedly, for every 25 residents in the state.

But what’s actually shocking about this? If government jobs are the best-paying and best-regulated jobs in the country, doesn’t it make sense to have more of them? It’s become the norm to sneer at Goans for wanting government jobs – with one of the biggest sneerers being the Chief Minister of Goa. Pramod Sawant regularly comments disparagingly on how Goans “hanker” for government jobs, which is ironical since he holds the top government position in the state himself, and shows no intention of giving it up. Goans should be more self-sufficient, declares the man whose whole existence – from lavish residence and plush car, to expanding entourage – is paid for by the Goan people. But, he insists, it is just not possible for everyone to have a government job.

Why not, is what we would like to know. If it is okay for him and others to be on the government payroll, why is it impossible for everyone else as well? Surely there is plenty of work that needs to be done in Goa. Almost everywhere one turns, you can see under-staffing of institutions, and overloading of existing employees, even in life-and-death situations like at the GMC and the other government hospitals. So why not create more jobs?

Because the government has no money, is the usual answer. But why doesn’t the government have the money?

What Sawant will never admit is that a big reason for why the government doesn’t have money is because of the way the government wastes money. An infamous example is the swearing-in ceremony of his own government which, according to the RTI enquiry filed by Aires Rodrigues, blew up an unbelievable Rs 9 crores of public money on just the one single event. Another area of waste is incessant, lavish, and unnecessary construction projects – like the recent decision to build a new Raj Bhavan, the ghastly ‘beautification’ of Miramar beach, etc. But perhaps the biggest problem, because it is a regular and ever-expanding one, is the cost of the current employees – and not all employees, but particularly the fattest of the fat cats on the government payroll. A good example here is how Sawant’s predecessor, Parrikar (celebrated in the press as a ‘good administrator’) hiked the government payment to Goa’s then attorney general, Atmaram Nadkarni, to up to Rs. 8 lakhs per month, making him the highest-paid state attorney general (serving the smallest state), earning more, apparently, than even the President of the country.

Parrikar’s largesse (at public cost) was not restricted to Nadkarni, but extended to all the MLAs, ministers, governor, and himself, given the fact that he presided over two massive pay rises for all these worthies. Just to give one example. Goa’s governor saw a salary rise from Rs. 13.20 lakhs per annum in 2015-16, to 28.2 lakhs in 2017-18, i.e. more than double. To this was added Rs. 67 lakhs for travel, including 10 lakhs for foreign travel. Along with this were discretionary grants of Rs 20 lakh, up from Rs 5.45 lakh in 2014-15, i.e. a hike of nearly 400% in 3 years. All these figures will have climbed much higher by now. Add on all the other big earners – MLAs, ministers, judges, IAS officers, directors of government bodies, etc, etc, not to forget the attorney general – and you understand why the Goa government has to regularly borrow money for salaries.

This kind of spending is especially disgusting when there are thousands of people struggling to make ends meet in Goa, despite working full-time and more. They even include government employees – except that the government does not consider them as employees. Working in government institutions as anything from gardeners, cleaners, watchmen, to clerical staff, librarians, and even professors, these employees earn less than half the official salary, or even less than that, depending on whether they are on contract, or daily wages, or hourly rates. Thus, for the same hours of work, a professor on permanent tenure might earn over Rs 2 lakh a month, a professor on contract might earn 60,000, a clerical employee on permanent tenure might earn 30,000, while a cleaner on contract might earn 10,000 – all in the same college. How can such huge differences in pay be justified?

What is even more interesting is that it is the people earning the most, the Grade-A category, who decide the salaries for everyone, including themselves. That is why there are regular pay commissions for the permanent staff, which have taken Grade-A salaries to astronomical heights; the Goa government has admitted that one reason for its financial debt is the last (7th) pay commission. But the same commissions provide nothing for the non-permanent.

With the government itself running this kind of top-heavy, discriminatory, and exploitative employment system, it is hardly going to ensure anything better in the private sector. That’s why nobody listens to Sawant when he advises Goan youth to look for jobs in the hospitality sector, where, he claims, two lakh jobs will be available over the next two years. Two lakh jobs paying what salaries? Offering what conditions of work? What dignity? Employment conditions in the private sector are so poor and unregulated for most employees that many prefer contract jobs in the government, hoping to one day become permanent.

So, there is no need to feel ashamed about the high percentage of government jobs per capita in Goa. In fact, this high percentage, along with remittances from NRI Goans, is surely what makes Goa a comparatively well-to-do society. And there is no need to castigate Goans for wanting government jobs either. They are not aiming to earn as much as Sawant does, nor to live in the lap of public-funded luxury. All they want is to earn enough, and with dignity, to make ends meet.

— — — —

A shorter version of this article was published in O Heraldo, on 15 October 2022.

Popular Essays

How India Sees Goa: Reflections in the 60th Year of Goa’s Annexation to India

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

Although Goa is politically part of Indian territory, the way the rest of India views Goa and its people, says something about the Indian gaze of Goa. I thought it is important to begin by putting down elements of what the Indian gaze looks like, in a bid to understand the sub-text – something that is sub-consciously internalized by people in other parts of India, perhaps based on how the Indian Corporate State has treated and is treating Goa. (more…)

Al-Zulaij Exclusive

60 Years of ‘Liberation’: The Pressing Need for a Constitutional Contract

By THE AL-ZULAIJ COLLECTIVE

Introduction

The 19th of December 2020 marks the commencement of the sixtieth year since Goa was annexed to the Indian Union, ending Portugal’s sovereignty over the territory. To celebrate this moment, the current government of Goa has planned a 100-crore celebration, even while the pandemic, and decades-long mismanagement of the Goan economy, along with corruption and communal politics, have pushed the Goan people to the edge. Against such a backdrop, it is critical that we look beyond the celebratory rhetoric, and focus on the structural problems that were written into India’s relationship with Goa right from the start. It is our argument that Goa’s ‘liberation’ may have ended Portuguese sovereignty over the territory, but, due to the manner through which the integration with the Indian Union took place, it has produced a condition of lawlessness that is in no small measure responsible for the unfolding chaos in Goa. (more…)

Interventions, Webinars

Albertina Almeida: “Homogenisation: Assumptions and Consequences”

Albertina Almeida was one of two speakers at this session organised on 7th December, 2020, on “Homogenisation: Assumptions and Consequences,” which was part of the 16 days of Activism Programme of the Human Rights Advocacy and Research Foundation.

Albertina Almeida takes the mask off the uniform laws, such as some of Goa’s Family Laws and India’s Criminal laws, to show how uniformity of laws has no value per se in and of itself and is a project that glosses over inequalities based on gender and other axis of discrimination.

Errata: Albertina Almeida would like to clarify here that there is a mistake at the start of her talk (which is corrected at the end of the programme). While speaking of the amount of property that can be willed away by parents under the Goan law, she mentions one-third. The correct amount is one half.

Albertina Almeida

Popular Essays

Thinking Goa, Thinking Kashmir

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

On August 5, 2019, exactly a year ago, Government of India effectively abrogated Article 370, in the name of expediting development and ending militancy. Kashmir was subjected to a lockdown which included blockage of communications. One felt concerned, and definitely angry at the fact that the Indian State had stomped all over Kashmir, worsening an already bad situation, and without giving the people of Kashmir a voice in the determination of their future. One may say that these two, Goa and Kashmir, cannot be compared. True, they can’t be compared, in that, in the one, it was a forced and heavily militarised lockdown meant to gag, but introduced in the name of checking terrorism, and in the other, the police-enforced lockdown was said to be meant as a safety measure to prevent spread of COVID 19. (more…)

Popular Essays

Stop Son Preference in Laws and Their Implementation!

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

At a recently held state-level training programme on the Pre-Conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques  (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994, social circumstances that drive the ‘son preference’ were factored as responsible for the adverse sex ratio. It is to be noted that Goa’s child sex ratio, according to the last census of 2011, stands at 942 females per 1000 males. It would seem that the son preference even informs law making, law implementation, law interpretation, or omission in synchronizing new laws with relatively progressive past laws. There are umpteen examples that can be given to illustrate this problem. (more…)