PANAJI
The Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) is nearing the end of a fourth five-year term but the capital city’s civic body is still miles away from resolving one of the most talked-of scams — the market scam — due to which revenues worth crores of rupees are being forfeited.
While the CCP’s ruling group, which owes allegiance to Revenue Minister Atanasio (Babush) Monserrate and is headed by his mayor-son Rohit Monserrate, has now set its eyes on expanding the market by building the third phase, little progress has been achieved in the management of the first two phases, fraught from inception with the ‘market scam’.
Who are the tenants of the hundreds of stalls in these two phases? Who are actually in possession of these stalls currently? When will the lease deeds actually be executed? When will revenue from rents begin to flow into the CCP’s coffers?
These and more questions continue to haunt Monserrate and Co more than 20 years after the new market was built and began functioning in 2004-05.
Meanwhile, the civic body continues to earn zilch from rents and other dues from the market even as it drains its financial resources for the market’s upkeep.
The scam has its roots in the very inception of this ‘new’ market complex built at the time when the State government under the late Manohar Parrikar’s chief ministership embarked on an infrastructure upgrade in the capital in preparation to host the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) back in the early 2000s.
It is linked to the act of the Goa State Infrastructure Development Corporation (GSIDC) locating the tenant-merchants in the new premises without handing it over to the CCP and executing fresh lease agreements or deeds. Umpteen attempts by multiple mayors to resolve this logjam and execute fresh lease deeds have since failed.
Monserrate Jr, who in the next four to five months will complete a full five-year term as mayor, has on multiple occasions claimed that the issues linked to the market scam are nearing resolution. He has claimed that “most of the tenant-merchants” have come on board and expressed willingness to sign deals with the civic body.
However, to date the civic body and its top officials have not been able to get even a single lease deed with any of the merchants executed.
The scam was probed by former bureaucrat N. D. Agrawal, and his report had unearthed some details, but “vested interests” in the State government got it pushed to the back burner around a decade ago. The file containing his report is now long forgotten.
Since then, the only time that the ‘market scam’ crops up in the news is when an election is due and city fathers go on an overdrive in a “tu-tu-mein-mein” mode of campaigning.
However, aside from the election campaigning, no one in the bureaucracy or the political ecosystem shows any urgency in resolving this massive leakage of revenue, which one estimate suggests amounts to nearly 12 crore annually.
At ground zero in the market, meanwhile, the Mario Miranda print on its walls remains the only bright spot. And laughing all the way to the bank are the hundreds of merchants occupying shops and spaces allocated to them through dubious processes executed in the tenures of several ex-mayors, commissioners and CCP power-brokers.
