“How much land does a man need” asked Leo Tolstoy, a renowned novelist from Russia, in his Nobel prize winning book, which was a part of our syllabus in school days. Sadly, we as Goans have learnt no lessons. Although Goa has only 3702 square kilometres of land with a density of 490 per km2, we have not bothered to protect and preserve it for posterity. Our politicians across party lines have gifted Goa towards unsustainable development of our territory.
Do we require seven engineering colleges and also include an IIT and National Institute of Engineering? Also numerous diploma courses and Vocational certificates are offered in technical education with the students finally ending up as waiters or clerks, totally unrelated to their field of study thus adding chaos and confusion with haphazard growth and unproductive development, leading to degradation and degeneration of Goa.
How has gifting of Anjediva Island to the Navy helped Goans? Does the dozen of defence installations in the capital city help Panjimites? Rather the CCP authorities find them a white Elephant and want them shifted just as the residents of the capital city find casinos, defence installation commercial units dominated, owned and exploited by migrants with the residents suffering from congestion pollution, pestilence and deterioration of the quality of life of the locals. Going beyond the suffering of residents of the capital city who suffer from acute water shortages, dumping of garbage, degradation of our rivers, estuaries, ponds, mangroves what we anticipate for the future would be far worse for Goa with the Mopa airport in the pipeline. We must understand that natural mineral resource generation as well as real estate development has directly as well as indirectly added to the woes, as the Goa government has done nothing concrete to address the need to conserve water and supply potable water to the citizens who today depend on water distributed by the “private tanker owners”, who would continue to exploit and harms the already depleted ground water supply all across Goa. It is pathetic that the Supreme Court had to intervene and cancel all leases granted illegal by the obstinate local government.
The construction of Mopa airport would be the final straw to the ultimate doom of this beautiful territory. As a consolation we see that one Kenneth Sequeira and other activists fight against the injustices of land acquisition by the Goa government, with the government giving a pittance for the land acquired.
The scenario in north Goa is very grim. As such Sattari, the Mopa plateau, the Western Ghats peripherals, of Bicholim, are finding that the Carbon cycle and the hydrological dynamics a reaching the points of instability. The concretisation of coastal Goa, due to unscientific growth of tourism and lopsided growth of real estate, is polluting ground water with sewage and also depleting water by the numerous growth of tankers used to usurp the water table for commercial use of water.
The manner in which North Goa is governed by our political class, to a development model which is unsustainable and would lead Goa temperature rise, leading the water in the atmosphere to rise thus promoting cyclone winds to gush across Goa, repeating the fury of flooding monsoons, thus damaging life, properties as seen in Canacona in early 2000 on a very small scale. On a miniscale the entire Bambolim, old Goa, the Kadamba plateau, which are catchment areas and which supplied water to the Chimbel as well as Santacruz lakes in a time drawn scientific scale are totally disturbed due to eight laning of roads from Panjim to Agasciam.
For Goans we have totally failed on all fronts. We have failed miserable to sustainable exploit our water resources. All ponds and lakes in Bicholim and Ponda are drying up. There are hardly any efforts to save or promote tree or forest cover in the Tiswadi region. The added nail to the coffin of woes of Goans is the green talukas of Sattari, Pednem, Mandrem together with Bardez are in the fast concretization lane increasing the prospects of unregulated rain fall due to our scant respect for understanding the development of aridity due to deforestation, temperature rise, heating up of our atmosphere leads to the generating of a vacuum and thereby increasing alarmingly the prospects of untimely cyclones lashing coastal Goa and placing our society into the jaws of nature’s fury, not too far from the near future, which surely would be too late then to address and take care of.
As such, the manner in which the developmental model sought is by those in power of specially in the last 5 years with nationalization of rivers promoting coal imports instead of generating solar energy and biomass, concretization of our hills and plateaus by wanton destruction of our green cover, we are inviting troubles for ourselves, while we merrily dance to the slow beats of music unwary of the fact we are slowly pushing ourselves to destruction in the same manner by which Mumbai is facing the consequences of unregulated rainfall due to haphazard development of the past.
