the goan I network
MARGAO
It’s official. Goa may figure in the list of states which have successfully constituted the District Planning Committees mandated under the Constitution, but the ground reality sounds totally different.
Believe it or not, the current term of the South Goa Zilla Panchayat will end three months from now in March next year without the District Planning Committee (DPC) having even had a single meeting, leave alone finalizing the Draft Development Plan for the district.
The DPC was created under Article 243ZD of the Constitution of India at the district level. However, it did not hold a single meeting during the last four-and-half years though it was constituted under the Chairmanship of Zilla Chairperson Navnath Naik, who is the ex-officio Chairperson of the DPC.
That’s not all. What’s interesting to note is that none of the South Goa Zilla Panchayat CEOs, who are the Member Secretaries of the DPC, had deemed proper to call a meeting for reasons best known to them.
When The Goan called upon incumbent ZP CEO and DPC Member Secretary Agnelo Fernandes to shed light on the DPC’s Constitutional mandate to prepare the DDP, he merely said his
office had invited the 88 village Panchayats to submit their village plans, but in vain.
Agnelo informed that out of the 88 VPs in the district, only eight panchayats have submitted their plans, but the remaining have failed to act on the correspondence.
Agnelo, however, had no answer when questioned why the DPC has not convened a meeting of the members till date, which would have provided an opportunity to ascertain the grievances of the panchayat bodies for not sending the village plans. “I will have a meeting with the Panchayat Minister Mauvin Godinho later next week.
I will discuss the DPC meeting with the Panchayat Director and the Minister and fix a tentative date to hold it,”
Agnelo said.
While the intention of the DPC Member Secretary, who has joined the office only two months ago may be clear, the proposed DPC meeting may not serve any purpose for the simple reason that it is mandated to finalise the DDP by November and forward the consolidated plan to the government to make budgetary provision for projects approved by the DPC.
Says J Santan Rodrigues, Convenor Panchayati Raj Institutions: “It is indeed a sad state of affairs that the DPC meeting could not be held during the current tenure. Leave alone formulating the DDP, the DPC should have met at least once to take stock of the situation by calling the MLAs as per the laid down guidelines”.
While the failure of the DPC Chairman Navnath Naik had figured prominently at the South Goa Zilla Panchayat meetings, the Chairperson had laid the blame at the government’s doorsteps,
saying correspondence made with the DPC was never replied by the government authorities.
Amongst various functions, the DPCs are entrusted with the responsibility of preparing the DDP and are concerned with matters of common interest between the panchayatsand the municipalities, including spatial planning, sharing of water and
other physical and natural resources.
