When the news broke that Goa would soon have an Indian Institute of Technology, many in the State cheered. But now, there’s a dark cloud over that plan.
IIT Goa will function out of a local college until the campus is built. But the proposed campus at Loliem-Polem is facing a lot of opposition from residents. Their main contention is that the plateau where the IIT campus is to be built has a lot of dense forest cover, which sustains a lot of wildlife. All this is poised to be destroyed if the campus comes up, claims one of the local activists. The plateau is also the reason for the abundant groundwater resources that the village sustains itself on. The destruction of the flora and fauna there would complete negate that.
As such, the government needs to take these concerns into consideration. Any project this big would have had an environmental impact assessment done before any plans were laid out. If so, then these plans must be shared with the people. In the past, the same village protested against the proposed construction of the National Institute of Technology (NIT), which was later shifted out of the village.
Here too, in the case of IIT, the government must tread carefully. It cannot afford to keep stakeholders like the villagers in the dark and it cannot afford to lose a prestigious project like IIT. It must find common ground between these two, just as it must do the same between developing the campus and maintaining green spaces in the village.
If the government wants the IIT campus to get built, it has to work with the villagers of Loliem-Polem, not against them.
