PANAJI
An order issued under quasi-judicial powers vested in the Revenue Minister, Jennifer Monserrate recently has breathed life into Goa Yachting Association’s four-decades-old bid to correct land records in the city survey over a piece of land where their office is located in Dona Paula since the mid-1970s.
Monserrate stayed a recent order of the deputy collector Gurudas Desai which had dismissed the 40-year-old appeal of the GYA to correct the land records.
The Association’s president Siddharth Satardekar in a statement said, the Deputy Collector Gurudas Desai’s order could have been a massive blow to it and had dismissed the oldest sports body’s 40-year-old application filed by the GYA for the correction of the revenue records.
On its formation in 1974, the association had been allotted two properties in Dona Paula by the government, only to later find out that its name did not reflect in the official revenue records.
While all handover documents and letters from the concerned authorities are in the possession of GYA and were presented to the Deputy Collector in June this year, the latter totally ignoring the order of an earlier Revenue Minister, dismissed the application.
The order put the association at risk of being deprived of the premises from where it functions, as statement issued by GYA said, adding that the association was successful in safeguarding its premises by filing a revision application before the revenue minister and obtaining an injunction against the Deputy Collector’s order.
“We can now again focus on the functioning of the GYA and the sport of sailing to build more champions for the State and the country,” the GYA president’s statement said.
“Incidentally the only Goans to represent India at the Asian Games 2018 at Jakarta were from GYA and we are hopeful that our sailors will qualify for the Asian Games 2022 and Paris Olympics 2024,” the GYA said.
According to GYA, the structures were officially handed over to the Goa Yachting Association by the Naval officer in-charge, Commodore G K Nadkar on August 30, 1974.
The Indian Navy were earlier running a sailing institute there since the Liberation of Goa in 1961.
According to Satardekar, in 1978, on discovering that the provisional revenue records showed that the premises was erroneously listed in the name of the Goa government’s River Navigation Department, the GYA had made an application to the City Survey for corrections.
This more than 40-year-old application of the GYA was eventually forwarded to the Deputy Collector who recently had dismissed it. Monserrate’s order now restores the land record correction proceedings.
