The appointment of former Taleigao and St Cruz MLA Atanasio “Babush” Monserrate as the Chairman of the Greater Panaji PDA has come as no surprise.
Right from the date the Town and Country Planning Board approved a decision to increase the number of Planning Areas in North Goa, and bifurcate the North Goa Planning and Development Authority it was known that it was being done solely to accommodate the Taleigao honcho.
It was also known that this was his reward for having not contested against Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar in the Panaji by-poll and after having joined the Goa Forward Party a few days prior to the elections.
It is this lack of surprise, bordering on apathy that needs to be checked. No doubt Goa’s populace has more than its fair share of reasons to be cynical especially after the manner in which the government was formed close to a year ago and the strange bedfellows that make up this government.
Nonetheless, for our own sakes, Goa needs to shake itself out of its cynical stupor and begin to once again hold the government to account every time they go against something they stood for.
It was the same Babush Monserrate who was once accused of trying to sell out Goa and ‘Goemkarponn’ through the then Regional Plan 2011 who is today part of the ‘Goemkarponn’ government. It is no different from putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.
Nonetheless, faced with such bare-faced doings by the government, it is important that the people of Goa not ‘get used to it’ but rather continue to view these developments in the same lens as they otherwise would have.
But more than that, it is important that the people remain circumspect every time the government announces a bout of ‘development’ seeking to justify it as either being inevitable or for the betterment of ‘the people’.
To put things in perspective, there has been no development on the front of the Transfer of Development Rights announced with much fanfare by the Town and Country Planning Minister Vijai Sardesai, which he said would protect most eco-sensitive areas in exchange for higher FAR in other areas that would be developed in any case.
Instead, what we are now faced with is higher development in these PDA areas, without the corresponding protection of the eco-sensitive zones or in other words -- a lose-lose situation for Goa.
Whatever the reasons for keeping the TDR project on hold, the government could have brought forth the policy in stages where people who today are losing their land to private forests (in the first stage) could be allowed to sell their development rights. Other categories of landholders could be added later.
