There’s only one question on everybody’s mind that refuses to go away more than one week after a blaze ripped through an illegally operating nightclub, at Arpora that claimed 25 lives -- how was a nightclub, operating from an illegal structure allowed to operate while the authorities looked away.
The local village panchayat has stated the Director of Panchayats granted a stay to the demolition order it had passed. The Directorate of Panchayats, in turn, has claimed that the stay order was issued by following the principles of natural justice in order to enable the operators to produce documentary proof that they indeed had all the permissions and that in the promoters defence, they did produce some permissions to substantiate their claims.
This back and forth between the local village panchayat and the Directorate of Panchayats has exposed a glaring loophole and administrative lacuna that was being exploited not just by those who were happily continuing to benefit from the legal “limbo” that the structure was effectively under and the enforcing authorities both of whom could conveniently claim they had done their bit in tackling the illegality.
This was an issue that was flagged by the Bombay High Court at Goa, who then instructed that structures that were being operated despite a stay on their demolition could not have the benefit of the stay order and would need to be sealed in order that they could not continue to commercially exploit the allegedly illegal structure. This was when dealing with the illegal structures within the jurisdiction of the village panchayat of Anjuna.
This state of legal limbo and procedural loophole is no accident. It is the state government, who via an amendment to the Goa Panchayati Raj Act, gave powers to the Directorate of Panchayats to overrule and rule over decisions taken by the panchayat body.
This indirectly transfers the decision making powers from the duly elected grassroot level of government to unelected bureaucrats who come under the direct control of the state administration and by extension the ministers and MLAs who control these bureaucrats.
Ideally, an appeal against a decision taken by a duly elected local body should lie with an independent tribunal or a court of law and not with individual bureaucrats, who more often than not, simply go by what the local MLA or minister has to say, completely negating decisions taken by the panchayats.
That’s not all. More recently the Goa Legislative Assembly passed yet another bill, that would allow for ‘deemed approvals’ for proposals placed before the panchayat bodies if the body in question does not act on the proposal or application within a stipulated timeframe.
This, the panchayat minister, sought to justify saying that it would prevent panchayat bodies from indefinitely delaying decisions on pending applications, for what he said was ‘obvious reasons.’
Calling panchayats corrupt and then shifting decision making in the hands of bureaucrats controlled by state level politicians isn’t a solution. It is not that these ‘obvious reasons’ do not exist at the state level. Shifting the point of corruption from the local body to the state government isn’t really solving any problems. Instead it is taking power out of the hands of local self governing bodies and reducing them to mere rubber stamps in the overall picture.
A real solution will be to ensure that the panchayat is accountable. That the panchayat be the final enforcing authority to decide whose trade licence can be issued, if and only if all the other statutory permissions are in place. The law should make it clear that all commercial structures that do not have valid trade licences from the panchayat are the panchayat’s responsibility to seal forthwith with the burden of responsibility and legal liability being cast on them if they are found guilty of dereliction of duty.
Appeals against the decisions of the panchayats should lie with an independent judicial body or tribunal and not in the hands of pliable bureaucrats controlled by politicians. Will the government be interested in this?
