PANAJI
The State government rode on its brute majority in the House to side-stepped stiff resistance from the Opposition and got the Goa Information Technology Development (Amendment) Bill passed 29 votes to seven.
The bill provides for setting up a committee which will perform the role of a planning and development authority (PDA) and in a sense bypass the Town and Country Planning Department in relation to applications for building and construction filed by IT and electronic manufacturing firms.
The amendment to the 2007 law, piloted by Tourism and IT Minister, Rohan Khaunte, is meant to facilitate grant of permissions to industrial entrepreneurs in the IT and electronic manufacturing sector, expeditiously.
At least three Opposition legislators -- Vjai Sardesai, Venzy Viegas and Viresh Borkar -- opposed the legislation stoutly saying it was promotion of real estate in the garb of boosting the IT sector.
Sardesai said, the bill was unnecessary and whatever it seeks to achieve can be done with mere co-ordination between the TCP minister and the IT minister, while Viegas argued that it was yet another attempt to bypass local bodies and the TCP department to promote real estate.
Borkar too joined in voicing concern over the carte blanche being given to industries that cheat the State by giving the jobs generated to non-Goans.
Khaunte, however, stoutly defended the amendment and claimed that it was only meant for the Tuem electronic cluster.
According to Khaunte the committee which the bill proposes to set up will be responsible to expeditiously decide on applications for land development and building construction as per local laws, including regional plan, outline development plan or other relevant plans prepared under the Goa Town and Country Planning Act, 1974 and the Goa Land Development and Building Construction Regulations, 2010.
When Speaker, Ramesh Tawadkar sought to put the motion for passage of the bill to the vote of the House, Opposition Leader Yuri Alemao pressed for a division forcing a head count.
The bill was eventually passed by 29 votes to seven. TCP Minister Vishwajit Rane was not in the House when the division head count was taken.
Meanwhile, the House also passed the bill which hiked the allowances and other perks of legislators, again amid noisy scenes and a semblance of dissent from the Opposition who said it would burden the exchequer further when the government was already facing a crunch to pay the social welfare schemes' benefits to the underprivileged.
Both Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and Minister for legislative affairs, Nilesh Cabral defended the hike saying the burden would be only for the fuel quota increased from 300 to 500 litres per month and the additional two staff allocated per MLA.
Cabral said the steep hikes in upper limits for advances to MLAs for housing and vehicles to Rs 40 lakh is not a burden since it is a loan and has to be repaid by members.
He also said that in the last assembly, only five legislators had availed the housing loan and around 25 of them had taken the advance for buying a new vehicle. The bill was later passed by a voice vote.
