Chief Minister Pramod Sawant while speaking after inaugurating the Multi-purpose Cyclone Centre by the Water Resources Department at Aquem-Margao on Saturday last week has asserted that his government will not allow any development in No Development Zones and low-lying fields in the state. He has also appealed to people of Goa not to fill up their paddy fields to set up shops and scrapyards just to earn Rs 50,000 and destroy them for the next 100 years. Well, today most Goans are seen casually doing the above mentioned ie filling their ancestral low-lying paddy fields with rubble/mud using JCBs, converting them into private commercial properties overnight by first planting a few coconut trees and then slowly constructing their illegal structures with backing of some panch members & even selling their illegally converted properties to all the neighbouring outsiders ie from builders lobby to scrapyard owners. I therefore feel that the government should take note of the above and bring in a very strict law at the very earliest to stop this madness of converting ancestral agricultural low-lying paddy fields into private commercial properties.
