For a State struggling to get its recipe right to plan its lands, its neighbourhoods, its resources, right. The way forward is for experts to lay out the broader plan and for people at the grassroots to decide what is best for them under those guidelines.
With the 73rd and 74th Constitutional amendment coming in,it was becoming Important that even my profession of planners understood whatwas going wrong. Were we mapping people’s needs on the plan or was it thecentre state relations that were deciding plans? The 73rd and 74th Amendmenttold the nation that (a) you cannot supersede the local bodies and (b) you doneed a mapped framework for transparency.
The other thing the constitution said they laid underschedule 11 and 12, 18 terms of activities shall be performed by municipalitiesand 27 items shall be performed by the panchayats of India. Today, it isamazing the items being performed by states through central budgets is thehijacking of local government functions because there is power in that. Itshouldn’t be so. The whole question of dictating to the people because we knowwhat is right for them is flawed.
So when I was asked to help out on the regional plan for Goaas advisor to the Goa government as a member of the task force, I willinglyagreed. We reconstituted this force with the message that the secrecy inheritedin mapping during British India, so as to deny access to your enemies, was notthe case anymore. The maps were for our people.
Goa is special and has to be protected environmentally. Thedecision making process for planning development on its land should be suchthat there is an inter-sectoral hijack. You cannot reach a situation where thetourism industry says it’s doing a better job than industry and needs moreland. Integrated growth can only happen if you map investments. The message ofDraft RP 2021 was that Goa was ripe for understanding its own plans and thepeople of Goa had to contribute knowing what they were contributing. If they were mapped wrong, we had to go backto them.
The Draft RP 2021 started as great exercise. We had Dr S PDeshpande, planner par excellence, who prepared RP 2001, Goa’s first RegionalPlan and who was my colleague when we started Goa’s Town and Country PlanningDepartment. Both of us were the planners while architect Charles Correa headedthe Task Force as Vice Chairman. We did reasonably well. We found that the mapswere skewed. So we superimposed Survey of India maps with Cadastral Maps andGoogle Earth images to build a scientific base for planning Goa. Once when youunderstand the land and its maps, planning gets simplified.
But the authorities got it wrong. While we proposed Draft RP2021 as a broad brush, a reference that explained what best could work fortheir neighbourhood, which had to be sent back to the people to decide what wasbest for them, the authorities swamped us with views of 8000 people asking uswhat we have done to their land. The idea was to decide where investments hadto take place and where not.
When I say we need to protect the two eco sensitivedistricts, I am not saying the government should protect it. The people have totake charge and responsibility for it. The profile of Goa is three ways - flatplains, undulating lands and the Ghats. The ghats have to be protected and theundulating profile used for sustainable development. As a planner in Delhi Iwas involved in the fight on the Konkan Railways. We were not supported byGoans but by the outside world. We argued as to why you needed to have therailways on the undulating land, rather than rushing into the plains, whichhave a fragile ecosystem. We lost and the result is evident. The disasters arehappening now.
Conservation is required if you need development. We lookedat two kinds of issues. Firstly, the areas for sustainable development withmodel laws in conservation, as an integral part of development, has to be set.Secondly, the interplay between eco sensitive zones and non eco sensitive zonesshowing the settlements and plots and how you can expand in relation to theservices you are getting needs to be set. For example, we were able toestablish that Goa cannot handle more than 18 lakh static and 2 lakh floatingpopulation in 2021. A resources crunch exists. In fact, the chiefs of the Powerand Water Departments threw up their hand in horror when we proposed thesefigures.
We have to look at transport movement, at water and power.We don’t have captive power stations and are buying power from the grid. Weneed water management, despite having plenty of water. We have to follow Goa’sgrowth rate and ascertain how many people it can accommodate. Not more than 20lakhs in my opinion. Going beyond this was a nightmare. The Draft RP 2021 wasalso to state that Goa was for incremental not runaway growth. Draft RP 2021 ifnot followed will lead to things going out of hand. For example, IndustriesMinister’s statement that every MLA’s constituency will have an industrialestate that is 40 of them should be analyzed against the 22 existing industrialestates and asked if we used all of them. Why is that a third of the plots areempty, while we have hardly achieved our participating rate of industries tokeep that buoyancy up?
Governance is another issue which needs a serious relook.The TCP Act was passed when Goa was still a Union Territory. Even RP 2001 wasdrawn when Goa was under Central Rule. At that time, all the budgets werewhetted at the Centre. Even when TCP Act was drawn we saw to it that it did notclash with Central Laws. Post Statehood, the laws had the whetting of Centreand if you have problem with it, it’s your problem.
When RP 2001 was done Goa did not know that it will be astate. A lot of parameters that it propounded also failed despite it being abrilliant plan. We were told to go beyond 2001 and rightly or wrongly we haveincorporated what existed till 2006. The government made a commitment. We alsosaid that whatever was left out of the settlements were incorporated, so thatwe had to work beyond up to 2006. Why then did the government go back to thepeople and say that 2001 would apply until the final draft RP 2021 wasfinalized? We said, “Don’t give them 6 months, give them a year. Keep it inabeyance, chose selective projects and look at operational use and distributebetween operational and non-operational use.”
Coming back to thedraft RP 2021, we saw how brilliant reports made for tourism, for industrieswere put into Draft RP 2021 including the state’s own vision. For the first time, a task force had accessto these reports. I spent time looking these reports and said ‘This isfantastic.’ What made the government say that ODPs and CDPs had to be kept outof Draft RP 2021. You kept Taleigao out of it. Agreed, regional parameters aredifferent, it covers the whole state. If a regional water body meanders throughnon ODP to ODP areas, how do we have different standards? A third of the people of Goa have beenremoved from the regional context which is wrong.
Everything has been changed. The draft RP 2021 was beingengineered and guided as a people’s plan within the Constitution. RP 2021 wasfinalised and written as something that planners should avoid. It is not aRegional Plan and definitely unconstitutional. It goes back to the top downprocess. It has colour schemes, which you cannot read, but if presented at anyforum get you better claps for RP 2021 than Draft RP 2021, because it is ingreater details with all the reds and the greens. But what about the grassrootsgovernance issue? It has not been addressed.
Most people don’t know what their ward boundary is. When youleave it to them they decide their fate. In Nuvem, the National Highway wasaligned from ideal to optimal alignment saving quite a few houses. Today filescan disappear, but maps cannot. With maps, you can catch your neighbour doingsomething wrong. RP 2021 lacks intransparency. People have been asked to pay Rs 14000 under RTI to get theirmaps. Where is the single, stitched map of the whole of Goa under RP 2021? It’sok if you don’t want to take my advice but then how do u expect me to work whenas the State Level Committee, I have to whet all this and sacrifice myprofessional integrity?
Take Heritage. You map the monuments through ASI. We willfix a 100 or 300 metres line around them. If in Delhi, we could do that and saveelements of history why not here? I waslooking only at Old Goa where the 100 and 300 metres line were drawn. The whole100-300 metres area is lined up with houses by the developer’s lobby. InTaleigao, large fields have gone under RP 2021.
I even told the CM in my letter, if you want the whole ofGoa to be industrial or agricultural, map it. Send them to the Panchayats andMunicipalities to fine tune. Regional Plans are broad brushes and not specificplot numbers break it up into wards and order each panchayat to map it.
The way forward
The notified RP 2021 is an exercise that tells you what youshould not be doing. Post Draft RP 2021, it should have been taken to thatlevel. Turning around the damage done by RP 2021 is a long process and that canbe shortened. Goa does not need a single regional plan. That is a fallacy. Lawallows you to prepare regional plans for the state or parts of the state sointerpret it as two regional plans - one for the north Goa district and one forthe south Goa district. A Regional District Plan is needed and the RegionalState Plan should be thrown out. This gives the State Government an opportunityto lay down sState visions, policies, finances and programs, so that apartnership emerges in the districts of india. Since Goa has opted for a twotier panchayati raj, it does not matter if you do it through talukas, which inany case are development blocks. A district having 5 or 6 development blockswill help, each containing a muncipality and panchayats. After that it is justan interplay of simply defining geographically the limits of the municipalityand panchayat. The first exercise, had involved all of us. After that is mappedand we know where the boundaries start, the census can come in. Populations getdefined per panchayat, Municipality andWard. There are 56 census towns in Goa.
As far as decentralisation has to happen, it has to be asper Regional Plan. We did not have census for RP 2011. You need a lower andhigher figure of population. This will help the Water Chief to work out thediameter of pipes based on water needs. The same applies to waste and water.
There should be an embargo on constructions till everythingis finalized according to proper planning
In conclusion, ever since Goa became a state it has becomenot only very confident but as some say it behaves arrogant. It does not haveto go with a begging bowl as it had tourism and mining revenue. That hasescalated and become two of the most dangerous revenues if they are not trackedwell. Goa has the best of beaches and if you go to Costa Brava, you will knowhow we can finish that off. If mining is done the way it was done then withscope to limit exports, we can restore the balance. Mapping is paramount.Planners are not trained to decide how you use your land, they will map it andtell you what can go where. The people have to take the call.
The Town and Country Plan is a plan of my neighbourhood,which I as a citizen need to decide. That should happen in 2020.
For Goa, the best man to draw its town and country planningis one of its most famous sons. Edgar F. Ribeiro, former chief town planner forTown and Country Planning Organization, India’s topmost town and countryplanning body. At 82, the man who refuses to retire, he is a very senior UrbanPlanner having over 40 years experience and expertise in the areas ofintegrated spatial planning & land use planning. He has served as Chairman,Delhi Development Authority, Director, School of Planning and Architecture, NewDelhi (India’s topmost planning and architecture school). He has served as aFellow of the Economic Development Institute, World Bank. He has been aMember/Chairman of over 15 years to International/National Institutionsaffiliated to the area of integrated planning. He also was Vice-Chairman,International Society of City of Regional Planners of seven years and formerPresident, Institute of Town Planners India.
Ribeiro has worked as an Urban Planning Specialist and/orTeam Leader in projects like Development of Delhi Master Plan 2021 AD, Concept Plan for Chandigarh Metropolitan Region, ADB/KUIDFC –funded Concept Plan for the Southern Karnataka Region, Development of Vision plan for Lucknow, DFID-funded Kolkata Environment Improvement Project etc.
