Wayanad: An eye opener?
Will Goa learn from the Wayanad tragedy, two dubious Bills and more in this week's newsletter from Goa
It’s been yet another eventful, rainy week in Goa and we have much to discuss, so without further ado, let’s dive straight in.
Wayanad
We really have only one place to begin this week’s recap -- Wayanad. Located in the upper reaches of the Western Ghats, the Wayanad district, one of the two Lok Sabha constituencies represented by Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, is now the home to the country’s deadliest natural disaster since the 2013 Uttarakhand floods.
300 lives lost and scores of others injured, has left the state of Kerala struggling to come to terms with the scale of the tragedy. While the number of dead makes a headline figure, the real challenge is for those living who, having lost everything, now have to rebuild their lives from scratch.
Such has been the impact of the tragedy on public consciousness that even the usually lethargic Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change was quick to reissue the Western Ghats Ecologically Sensitive Areas draft notification provisionally notifying 56,000 sq km of western ghats land as eco sensitive. This includes 104 villages in Goa and for now at least, doesn’t appear to have succumbed to the Goa government’s demand to drop 40 villages from the ESA list.
The tragedy echoed in the Goa Legislative Assembly this week.
Leader of Opposition Yuri Alemão along with BJP legislator Ganesh Gaonkar, who represents Sanvordem constituency, and San André legislator Viresh Borkar moved a calling attention motion expressing the anxiety that “unplanned and excessive development in ecologically sensitive areas in both districts of Goa including Dharbandora in the Western Ghats are prone to such landslides” and that the Wayanad tragedy could repeat here.
In his response, Revenue Minister (who is in charge of Disaster Management) Atanasio Monserrate said a lot of things. Among them was a claim that “no development is otherwise permitted in ecologically sensitive areas such as hilly regions having slopes more than 25 %, low lying paddy fields, khazan lands, forest lands, mangroves etc.
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant too backed up his minister, saying that the Wayanad incident is an eyeopener for Goa and promised that his government is “developing a system that will stop hill cutting.”
“Wayanad (disaster) is an eye opener. In Goa we have identified some areas and I am giving strict instructions to the disaster management authority, that in whichever areas the report has said is landslide prone, not only the Western Ghats, but also the internal hills, there is no disturbing their stability,” Sawant said.
Which is all well and good, until you realise that the entire discussion failed to address the elephant in the room
As the Goa Foundation pointed out in a press note released this week, 179 applications have been filed for conversion of Goa’s hill slopes to settlement. Of these, the TCP Department has already processed 45 applications for a total of 7,95,396 sq mts (nearly 8 lakh sq m) opening them up for construction.
Similarly under section 39 A the town Planning department has already received a total of 40 proposals for conversion of plots on hill slopes to settlement amounting to a total of 3-lakh square metres to settlement.
“If the Chief Minister does not know what his town planning minister is up to, he should either resign or sack the Town Planning Minister and his Chief Town Planner,” Director of Goa Foundation Claude Alvares, said.
What can you do?
If you want to do something about what’s happening, here’s a good place to start: On Sunday at the Alto Porvorim Sport Club, the Goa Bachao Abhiyan is holding a meet to educate and empower citizens on how to track land conversions and changes, it would be great if you could attend. But more than that, on Monday August 5, the state legislative assembly will discuss the budgetary demands for the Town and Country Planning Department during the afternoon and evening sessions. It would be of great help if you could show up, get a visitor’s pass and let your representatives know that you are watching them on issues that matter.
If you’re one of those who belongs to the camp that believes that there’s not too much wrong in allowing private landowners to develop their land by changing it to settlement, you would do well to read the ‘scourge of flawed planning’ by Karsten Miranda in the Herald published last Sunday.
Bills with benefits
If you haven’t been paying close attention, it will have been easy to miss that the Goa government has tabled two Bills -- The Goa Town and Country Planning (Amendment and Validation) Bill, 2024, that I discussed in my last newsletter, and The Goa Erection of Shacks on Public Beaches (Regulation and Control) Bill, 2024 — in the Goa Legislative Assembly this week.
With the text of the Bill, now being made available it is pretty clear what the TCP amendment sets out to do. I’ll spare you the technicalities to tell you in simple terms that this Bill has been brought about to undo this order of the Bombay High Court at Goa, which, in February this year, stayed the operation of the Calangute-Candolim Outlined Development Plan notified sometime in December 2023. And when the government brought an ordinance to effectively revive the stayed ODP, the High Court, once again, stayed any action that was to be carried out under the ODPs that were sought to be revived.
This law then, has been brought to firstly, give permanence to the ordinance, and secondly to try and prevent the High Court from overruling anything that the Town and Country Planning Department permits under the said ODP, effectively to state that whatever the TCP decides, will be final. This, of course, is sure to be challenged, so don’t expect that this is the last you’ve heard of it. Stay tuned.
The other Bill -- The Goa Erection of Shacks on Public Beaches (Regulation and Control) Bill, 2024 -- is also brought with a stated aim of providing “for special regulation and control of temporary and seasonal structures permitted under Coastal Regulation Zone Notification.”
According to the Bill, “the erection and operation of the beach shacks on the beach site under the Goa Shack Policy and the temporary and seasonal structures permitted by the Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority shall not require any construction licence or a technical clearance” either under The Goa Town and Country Planning Act, 1974, The Goa (Regulation of Land Development and Building Construction) Act, 2008 or The Goa Panchayat Raj Act.
On the face of it, it appears to be an innocuous piece of legislation that seeks to provide a legal framework for the erection of beach shacks and spare them from compliances from multiple departments especially the TCP, Panchayats, etc.
But then, it wasn’t really long ago — in March this year — when the High Court, refused to grant exemptions to owners of commercial structures in Anjuna, who were pleading against the demolition of their structures on grounds that their structures were ‘temporary’.
Among those facing the axe were coastal commercial establishments belonging to several politicians including Calangute MLA Michael Lobo. Now that you know this, the Bill makes much more sense doesn’t it?
Mopa in the news again
The new International airport at Mopa is in the news once again. This time because the newly inaugurated 1200 crore elevated road that goes straight from Dhargal to the airport was flooded barely weeks after its inauguration.
Just like the airport itself, the approach road too seems to be suffering from lack of rainwater management. The surrounding villages, meanwhile, continue to suffer from the deluge flowing down from the airport every time it pours.
But what really struck me in this entire saga is this edit in The Goan Everyday that pointed out that the state and central governments have, without thinking twice, spent Rs 1200 crore on the approach road to the airport and promised another Rs 30,000 crore over five years for various road related projects, but don’t have even Rs 350-crore to spend on repairs of khazan bunds in Goa, a project for which is pending for years before the Union government.
Romi Konkanni
And finally, there was a minor kerfuffle over Romi Konkanni this week. Last month, a new group called the Global Konkani Forum, announced a renewed push for their demand for official recognition of Romi Konkanni.
Since then there have been several meetings, and as many as 33 panchayats across the state have adopted gram sabha resolutions to grant official status to Romi Konkanni.
The matter was discussed during the Goa Legislative Assembly, during the discussion on demands for grants to the official language with MLAs echoing the demands of the panchayats but alas, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant sought to bring the issue to a swift end when he said that there would be no rethink of the issue and that it was settled back in 1987.
That’s all I have for you this week. If you have any suggestions you would like to contribute or an issue you want covered, do write to me and I’ll see how best I can do it. As always, if you like what I write make sure you subscribe, share and spread the word.
Until next week, tchau
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Great stuff
These rogue ministers will never learn or will never bother to. The breach of privilege threat is a clear indication in which direction the govt is headed. They are mentally sick, really.