Over the weekend, Goa was witness to a massive protest led by the people of Siridao Pale over the provisionally approved conversion of nearly 1 lakh square metres of land in the village — land that falls on both sides of the national highway after the Bambolim plateau to the settlement. The people after first protesting in their village with a torch rally later camped at the TCP office demanding the revocation of the conversion notification and have already filed detailed objections to the land conversion -- pointing out the negative effects such a conversion will have on their village -- from threatening their sources of water, to being thickly treed no development slopes that were marked as private forest by the Karapurkar committee, and other environmental ill effects.
However, what really fuelled the protests was how the villagers, including their MLA, were treated when they went to the TCP department with their legitimate grievances, demanding that the zone conversions be scrapped. The villagers were labelled blackmailers, with Town and Country Planning Minister Vishwajit Rane keen to stress that ‘laws’ are to be made in the Goa Legislative Assembly and not legislated on the street. More than that, however, the manner in which the Police treated the protesters, including the sitting MLA, has sparked outrage concerning how far the government is willing to go to protect its moves to promote private interests over the common good.
While Town and Country Planning Minister Vishwajit Rane may be right in saying that the right place to debate laws is in the Goa Legislative Assembly, it also must be borne in mind that a law enacted in the State Legislative Assembly cannot override the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of India, most notably the right to life, the right to equality (the right to be treated fairly), the six fundamental freedoms (expression, peaceful assembly, etc) as well as the right to personal liberty as granted by the Constitution.
The Constitution guarantees that numerical strength does not equate with the right to take away the rights of those who may not have the numbers to make a difference at the ballot box. We’ve seen this time and again where courts have stood up for the rights of the individual, of numerically disadvantaged sections and of course, for the rights of the natural world that does not have a voice to speak for itself.
The demands of the villagers of Siridao Pale and, indeed, the whole of Goa are not only justified, but they have been making their case in a peaceful manner. The government cannot extricate itself by pointing to individual cases where land conversion notifications have been withdrawn after people’s protests. Let us not forget that not too long ago, the government was forced to back down following a protest from the people of Sattari against the IIT proposed at Guleli in the taluka.
It may also be recalled that while the government was defending section 17(2), it was the very section that was read down as unconstitutional by the High Court. Section 39(A) suffers from the same defects. Just because the justification of the changes -- from stating that they were mistakes to allowing for a period to permit people to submit objections, before summarily rejecting such objections -- does not change the fact that it is a very problematic section.
It will be in the best interest of all if the government agrees to rethink Section 39(A) and follows the path of drafting a fresh regional plan.
