Building a house in your own property in Goa requires a number of approvals as follows: licence to cut a tree; approval of TCP, Mamlatdar and Forest Department to get conversion sanad from Collector; approval of TCP and Health Officer to get construction licence of panchayat; completion certificate of TCP and approval of Health Officer to get Occupancy Certificate from panchayat; and so on.
To get these approvals at different stages you have to submit about 12 files and face equal number of inspections by various authorities in your own transport. The charges you have to pay include processing fees, inspection fees, NOC fees, infrastructure fee, conversion fee, licence fee, connection fees and deposits, and not to mention under-the-table fees to some. Only after this ordeal you can think of moving into your legally built house. Law abiding citizens follow these cumbersome procedures since their discipline knows not any other way.
Now we hear, in this year preceding the elections that the Goa government wants to regularise all illegal constructions and give them house numbers. And it wants the people to believe that it doesn’t mean that such houses will become legal. What else then remains to be done? When l pay house tax and can live in, rent and even sell my house does it matter what you call it. The party in power may gain politically by this move but will surely prove to be disastrous for the State since illegal constructions by migrants and all and sundry will increase by leaps and bounds.
