With just a week left for Goa’s elections, it is between now and voting day that most people will be making up their minds on which party and which candidate to vote for. While most political parties have already announced their manifestos it’s only the BJP among the major political parties that is left to announce its manifesto.
Simultaneously, various NGOs, action groups and civil society organisations have launched a bunch of manifestos that focus primarily on the environment. The Goa Green manifesto, the People’s Manifesto, the Goenchi Mati manifesto, lists out and calls on parties to adopt a set of sustainable and responsible choices, and besides endorsing the manifesto, also calls on them to not violate it with projects and plans that defeat its very purpose.
The response from parties has been lukewarm at best. While there is no doubt that parties like the Congress, the AAP and the Trinamool have publicly committed to endorsing various manifestos and have included portions like the promise to scrap the three linear projects, scrap CRZ 2019 and scrap section 16B of the Town and Country Planning Act, and have made verbal assurances to protect sand dunes and to ban damaging ways of fishing, none of the parties have gone all the way.
On the contrary, Churchill Alemao of the Trinamool has gone on record to say that they will allow bull trawling and LED fishing but only in the deep sea and not closer to the coast. Alemao went a step further and spoke of diluting CRZ regulations especially when it came to protecting sand dunes and other crucial features of our coast.
Similarly, none of the parties have committed to protect Goa’s lateritic plateaus which, due to gross ignorance have been classified as ‘waste land’ and unsurprisingly have been ravaged by successive governments to set up industrial estates completely oblivious to the kind of life they are home to. As pointed out by the environmental groups, the laterite plateaus are unique areas with rich flora and fauna and often crucial carbon sinks that cannot simply be used for industries or other infrastructure just because in the minds of our planners that if an area is devoid of trees, it is fair game for development.
As the manifesto points out, importance has been given to protecting forests, but forests are not the only ecosystem we live amidst. There are the grasslands, the coastal ecosystem, freshwater ecosystems, open natural ecosystems (rocky plateaus), Agrarian Ecosystems (Kazan land), estuarine mangroves, etc. Each is home to a different set of species that makes up a different ecological niche. A perfect example of this was when researchers of the Goa University discovered a new species of gecko right under their very noses within the campus of the Goa University as proof that despite the seeming absence of trees, life thrives in what the government normally classifies as ‘wasteland’ to be used for universities, industrial estates, power stations and the like.
It is important that if we want to save Goa, that political parties, especially the ones that have a real shot at power wholly endorse Goa’s green manifestos, or risk Goa being lost forever to a deluge of urbanisation, industrialisation and concrete jungles in place of green hills.
