the goan I network
PANAJI
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant’s statement backing the casino industry and terming it an essential party of the State’s tourism industry got the backing of the BJP state unit president, Vinay Tendulkar on Wednesday.
“He is the Chief Minister and he belongs to our party. There is nothing wrong in his statement. I am fully in support of his statement,” Tendulkar said when he was asked to react to Sawant’s strong stance in support of casinos.
The issue of casinos congesting the capital city and their removal from the Mandovi river has been a topic of discussion for long and came into sharp focus during the recent Panaji bypoll after the eventual winner Atanasio (Babush) Monserrate promised to remove the floating casinos out of the river within 100 days.
Days after the election result, Monserrate, who controls the CCP also launched a drive to clear encroachments by casino companies along public spaces on the riverfront where they operate.
Sawant, meanwhile, claimed that the government will visit the issue of re-locating the off-shore casinos while drafting the casino policy, a draft of which proposes a ‘Gaming Zone’ around the site of the greenfield airport project on the Mopa airport. He ruled out interfering with the industry until such time as the casino policy is framed and adopted by the government.
Meanwhile, Sawant also came in for sharp criticism from former GSM mentor Subhash Velingkar for his pro-casino comment.
It was a shame that the BJP-led was openly backing the casino industry, Velingkar said and demanded a white paper on the activity’s ill-effects on the State.
The BJP itself had opposed the industry for over a decade when it was in the Opposition on grounds that it was the cause of social evils and rode to power in the 2012 general elections when it promised to do away with the activity altogether.
