PANAJI
A fortnight ago, the power corridors of the Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) were abuzz with talk of commencing the third phase of the capital city’s market.
Intense discussions among councillors and the ruling group’s power brokers centred around the plans for this phase, which are expected to bring down the decades-old, dilapidated building from the civic body’s Francisco Branco (Baschik) era and replace it with a sprawling new structure to house the fish and meat market.
Lost in that din of discussion, however, is the functionality of the first two phases, mired in the long-forgotten ‘market scam’ on account of which the capital city’s civic body earns zilch in rents and other revenues while draining its financial resources in the market’s upkeep.
It is a scam that has its genesis in locating the tenant-merchants in the new premises without executing fresh lease agreements or deeds, a situation which continues to haunt the civic body and yet the city fathers lack the inertia, for unexplained reasons, to resolve it.
CCP Mayor Rohit Monserrate, who completed two one-year terms and started his third recently, claimed that the issue is nearing resolution and most of the tenant-merchants have expressed willingness to sign deals with the civic body ” believable only when the deals are actually signed.
More than a decade ago, the scam was probed and details were unearthed when former bureaucrat ND Agrawal submitted a report. However, vested interests in the State government got it pushed to the back burner and eventually into cold storage.
Since then, the only time that the ‘market scam’ got recalled into public memory was during the campaign for the CCP polls in 2016 and more recently in 2021. But beyond the election campaign, no one within the CCP seems keen to resolve this leakage of rental revenues estimated to be an astronomical Rs 12 crore annually.
At the market brightened up by Mario Miranda murals, meanwhile, hundreds of merchants occupying shops and spaces allocated to them through dubious processes executed by multiple ex-mayors and commissioners, continue to make merry doing brisk business and yet paying zero rents to the CCP.
If authoritative sources in the CCP are to be believed, at least five individuals linked to the CCP collect money from the market tenants on a monthly basis as ‘rent’ but none of it finds its way into the CCP’s coffers. Where it goes is anybody’s guess, and is the principal reason why no power in the civic body is showing any urgency to resolve this market imbroglio.
Apart from mere words, Monserrate, who is the current mayor with a brute majority, is also showing little promise that this scam, which by a conservative estimate could now be worth over Rs 100 crore ” revenue the CCP should have rightfully earned but didn’t ” will be resolved and the culprits brought to book.
