PANAJI
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant on Tuesday said that the government will commence providing underground utility ducts along roads across Goa from April 2 to rid the State of the problem of repeated road digging no sooner they are laid with a fresh hot-mix carpet.
Sawant made the statement in the Goa legislative assembly during his reply to the discussion on the motion of thanks to the Governor’s address.
“The PWD is coordinating with the Electricity and Information Technology (IT) departments to make sure that henceforth, from April 1 onwards, whenever and wherever roads are being hotmixed, utility ducts will be provided across Goa,” Sawant, who also holds the PWD portfolio, said.
Earlier, the chief minister was listing out, year-wise, the length of roads that were laid with fresh hot-mix carpets aggregating over 2,000 kilometres since 2020-21.
EDUCATION SECTOR
On the education front, Sawant said his government was on course to implement the National Education Policy (NEP) and denied the Opposition charge of being in a hurry to become the first State to roll out the policy fully.
“We are not in a race to become the first State. We have been working on it, training teachers since the last three years. Our teams have moved at the taluka level, interacting with school and college managements. We have trained teachers, some as master trainers themselves,” Sawant said.
The chief minister also said that the government has taken futuristic steps in skill development with infrastructure upgrades of the various ITIs and introducing new courses there.
“We have introduced more hospitality related courses in ITIs. Hotel groups have been roped in and six months of the one year course will be on-job training in their establishments. We will be signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) where the trainees will be paid a stipend and also to absorb them on their rolls on completion of the course,” Sawant said.
HEALTH SECTOR
Sawant also said that in the health sector too a number of new initiates had raised the profile of Goa’s public health services delivery.
“The ambulance services run by EMRI have thus far (since inception) attended to over 7 lakh emergency situations. It will not be wrong to say that they have saved over 60,000 lives,” Sawant said.
AGRI SCHEMES
Sawant also said that the government’s boost to farming with several subsidies and schemes has increased production, especially horticulture.
“The Horticulture Corporation has reduced by nearly thirty per cent the volume of vegetables it used to bring in from outside the State. This means local production has increased by 30 per cent,” Sawant said.
He also claimed that of the 13 Central programmes like Har Ghar Jal and others which are being monitored by Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, Goa is the first State to achieve 100 per cent performance in 80 per cent of the programmes.
