PANAJI
In a bid to tackle the trend in Goa where local communities and civil society react adversely to locating large projects anywhere in Goa, the State government has designated the Goa Institute of Public Administration and Rural Development (GIPARD) as the nodal agency to assess the social impact of all land acquisition proposals here on.Three separate notifications issued by the State government and one apiece by the two district collectors, have invoked powers under subrule (1) of rule 5 of the Goa Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Rules, 2019, to designate GIPARD as the State Social Impact Assessment Unit (SIA) for the entire State.
These notifications were issued in the last week of November.
It is not uncommon in Goa where stiff resistance to land acquisitions to locate large projects snowballs into major agitations forcing the political establishment to delay or eventually abandon it.
The most recent such case is that of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) which even after seven years is yet to be allocated land for its independent campus and has been making do in a make-shift one sharing space with the Goa Engineering College (GEC) at the latter's sprawling Farmagudi campus.
The State government's third attempt at allocating land for the IIT had to be abandoned after an agitation initially by locals at Shel-Melaulim in Sattari taluka snowballed into a major state-level movement.
Other recent examples where the government was forced to reverse its decisions to set up projects in Goa were the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) projects at various locations in the State.
The new move to appoint GIPARD as the SIA to assess the social impacts of land acquisition proposals is an effort to put in place a well defined mechanism by which issues of local communities and other social stakeholders including civil society are addressed well in time, government sources said.
