PANAJI
Six years after Goa was allotted an institute of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) by an amendment to the Institutes of Technology Act in Parliament and IIT-Goa began operations in that academic year from a temporary campus alongside the Goa Engineering College in Farmagudi, the State government is still struggling to allot a site for its permanent campus.
The crux of the opposition which has fuelled the latest controversy playing out in Sanguem is the penchant of Goa's hyper-local communities to refuse to part with large tracts of land and to raise a hue and cry over such big projects which they perceive to have no stakes for themselves or the larger community.
This current site in Sanguem, where the government is eyeing some 300-plus acres (approximately 13 lakh square metres) it hopes to hand over to IIT-Goa to set up its permanent campus. The opposition to the site is mainly coming from farmers of Cotarli in Uguem panchayat and Molcornem in neighbouring Quepem taluka.
Most of those at the forefront, opposing the government's plans for the IIT-Goa campus here are small farmers holding between one to five acres of land and see no hope of any livelihood beyond farming. They are tribals, who are in possession and have for generations lived on the produce of approximately two-lakh square metres of the 13-odd lakh square metre parcel of land.
Fourth site zeroed in
The current one at Sanguem is the fourth location that the Goa government has set its sights on to facilitate the setting up of IIT-Goa's permanent campus.
Earlier, the State government had abandoned three earlier sites -- Canacona back in 2016, another site at Sanguem in 2018 and Melaulim-Sattari in 2020.
Each time locals raised a banner of protest and succeeded in pressuring the political executive into giving up on the plan to locate the IIT-Goa campus there.
The proposal for the current site in Sanguem is heading in the same direction, seemingly for now, as the leadership in the government seems adamant to refuse to learn the lessons of the past.
News that the government was eyeing this site at Sanguem was first broken by the freshly victorious MLA of Sanguem and now a cabinet minister Subhash Phaldessai weeks after the March 10 results of the assembly elections declaring the Bharatiya Janata Party a winner.
Phaldessai's public support for locating the IIT in his constituency was quickly picked up by the government of Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, freshly sworn in for a second term, and attempts to locate the permanent campus of IIT-Goa there began in right earnest.
But events in the subsequent days followed the same script as the fiasco in Melaulim-Sattari.
In July, Phaldessai still high on his election victory, conducted a public meeting and mobilised crowds to show "public support" for his idea to locate the IIT campus there. While it did have an impact on the government belonging to Phaldessai's own BJP, it only served as a wake-up call for the farmers who immediately worked on organising their own 'public meeting' to voice their opposition. But their meeting was attacked and disrupted, allegedly by 'supporters' of Phaldessai, and the issue landed in the jurisdiction of the police who had cross-complaints registered with them by both sides.
In the following weeks, the scenes of the Melaulim locals' agitation against locating the IIT campus there were replicated with opponents of the proposal, organised under the banner of a 'Sanguem Bachav Samiti' blockading the area when government officials reached the site to "survey" the area. Police in numbers had to be brought in and the men-in-uniform wielded the stick to try and disperse the agitators, last month.
Now, a tense atmosphere prevails there and the authorities have imposed Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) which restricts public mobilisation.
Why oppose?
The reasons why the farmers and locals are opposing the IIT campus at this site in Sanguem, mostly comprising forested hills, slopes, orchards and farmlands bang in the middle of the well-irrigated command area of the massive Selaulim dam a few kilometres away is no different from those people in Melaulim cited.
"Firstly, the land bearing at Cotarli village belongs to the local communities and has held in commons for thousands of years. It is wrongly recorded in the government's ownership during the 1970s survey," says green activist Abhijeet Prabhudesai, one of the mentors of the agitating locals.
The erroneous land records must be rectified and the land rights of the local communities recognised, Prabhudesai says and faults the government for attempting to usurp this land by misusing what he calls "fraudulent" land records.
Another reason, according to Prabhudesai is the permanent change in the nature of the land which will occur with an IIT campus coming up.
"These lands comprise rich forests, wildlife, steep slopes as well as prime, irrigated agricultural lands. They cannot be allowed to be diverted for other uses. IIT Goa can be accommodated at Farmagudi. There is enough land there. There is a solution without destruction or displacement of local communities."
Former Nylon 6,6 site an option?
Post-liberation Goa has a history of local uprisings and agitations against projects, mostly due to these gobbling large tracts of scarce land resources and damage to the environment.
In the 1970s, the pollution of the Zuari river, which left schools of fish dead due to effluents from the Zuari Agro-chemical plant there and in later decades, the Konkan railway project, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), Meta Strips project, six-laning of highway and Mopa airport, have all witnessed vociferous protests. The Konkan Railway and the Mopa airport are perhaps the only two big projects that successive governments have managed to push through, but not without significantly reducing the land requirements and conceding some major local demands.
Another big project that had to fold and quit Goa even before it was set up was Dupont's Nylon 6,6 project, which was proposed on a large plateau in Savoi Verem.
The land at Savoi Verem, formerly acquired for the abandoned Nylon 6,6 project and subsequently proposed to be converted into an SEZ which again was aborted, is currently back in possession of Goa Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC). It has had no takers for industrial investment despite two rounds of e-auctioning and could be an alternative site if it suits the requirements of IIT-Goa.
The hunch for the GIDC and the Goa government, however, is that it needs to generate revenue from the Savoi Verem SEZ land to pay back the Rs 200-plus crore loan it took to pay the promoters and take back its possession. The government will not make any money if it hands over the land to IIT-Goa for its permanent campus.
