The National Green Tribunal has ‘asked’ the Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority to prepare an inventory of all coastal structures to be updated every year to keep track of illegal structures on a real-time basis rather than acting only based on complaints as is currently the practice. While the GCZMA has said that they would place the order of the NGT before a meeting of the body to decide how to act on it, don’t hold your breath.
If the conduct of the GCZMA is anything to go by, it appears that the statutory regulator is acting only very reluctantly against illegalities and that too only after complainants are asked to make repeated visits to the office. More often they are left to approach either the High Court or the National Green Tribunal to get the body to act against violators.
On the other side, violators are given several opportunities to be heard and chances to produce documents without any action being initiated against them until they exhaust all legal options to save their structures which are quite patently illegal even to the naked eye. Decisions are taken and then reviewed, violators are heard and then heard again, and inspections are conducted and then conducted again. Even in cases where the Supreme Court has dismissed appeals against demolition, the GCZMA thinks it fit to reexamine the matter.
This takes years -- cases that have been filed back in 2007 and perhaps even earlier are allowed to remain standing while the cases continue and the violators are allowed to profit from their structures for the entire duration that the case is pending making a complete mockery of the law. Files go missing, survey plans are manipulated and documents forged and certificates doctored all in a bid to save structures that shouldn’t have been allowed to come up in the first place.
Rather than become a body of environmental protection, the GCZMA has become a bureaucratic body -- in no small measure because both the chairman and the member secretary are bureaucrats -- and the environmentalists are relegated to two posts of expert members who are appointed on the body. With the chairman and the member secretary having disproportionate power over the functioning of the body and interference from MLAs, ministers and revenue officials in its functioning, it is no surprise that the body has utterly failed in its mission to do what it is set up to do -- protect the coast.
Let’s also not forget that the entire exercise of conducting a beach carrying capacity study was undertaken and the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management gave its report suggesting how many shacks and other structures can be allowed along a stretch of beach. Yet the GCZMA now chooses to ignore the report and will wilfully allow more than the mandated structures.
If activists wish to remedy this, they will have to file cases and hope for a quick hearing and disposal by which time the violations will continue and no adverse action will be taken against the officials who violate the law with impunity. There is little hope then, that the NGT’s directions for an annually updated inventory of structures amount to anything concrete much less an honest appraisal exercise to protect the vulnerable coast.
