It is a disgrace that Goa finds itself topping the country's list of coastal regulation zone violations for the past five years. In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha, Minister of State, MoEF&CC Ashwini Kumar Choubey stated that 974 cases of zone violation were reported from Goa out of the 1,878 cases nationwide during the last five years. This is not only a dishonour but reflects the state of lawlessness.
Goa is known for coastal violations because of the link to tourism and commercial interests, but the question is, who is responsible? Is it the failure of the GCZMA, the political class, or is it the success story of sheer power-wielding sections of society seeking every opportunity to eat into the tourism pie?
The role of GCZMA comes into immediate focus on the topic of coastal violations. The body has been entrusted with the responsibility of conserving, protecting and improving the quality of the coastal environment, besides checking on violations and illegal constructions along the coast. The question is whether GCZMA has done justice to the job at hand. Although relegated to being only a watchdog for violations, the GCZMA has fallen way short in its role, despite devoting its full attention to coastal violations, and the reasons may be diverse.
On the flip side, the GCZMA has inherent weaknesses. It does not have the wherewithal to police the entire Goa coastline, and, in some cases, it has been compromised either because of the high stakes in coastal violations or due to political pressures. Moreover, the GCZMA comes under the administrative control of the State government, which could act as an impediment to its autonomy. Hence, we hear of situations where shacks are allocated even on sand dunes in Morjim.
The high rate of coastal violations brings us to the concerns raised by citizens while drawing the coastal zone management plan. It may be noted that citizens and activists had pointed to discrepancies in the plan draft, missing geomorphological features and a lack of planning to protect and restore the coastline. The hue and cry were testimony to the fact that all was not well along the coast. How does one justify the exclusion of 46 lakh sqmts of sand dunes in the draft coastal plan?
The political leadership must answer why there is no introspection and course correction and why there is no will to plug loopholes and arrest the surge in these violations. The lack of seriousness is apparent because the priority has been to control the GCZMA instead of giving it independence. For example, even when a new GCZMA team was being finalised, there was a concerted effort to choose favourites leading to an inordinate delay in the installation of the body. For a brief period, there was no coastal authority team in place. Moreover, no attention is paid to include legal experts in the team since the body is handling cases that are quasi-judicial in nature.
We hope the data presented in Rajya Sabha will be an eye-opener to the government, GCZMA, law enforcement agencies and violators. We hope loopholes are covered, especially with post-approval or post-completion audits and stringent checks on compliance. We hope accountability will prevail in the years ahead as Goa stares at wholesale commercialisation of the coastline.
