DR. JOE D’SOUZA
Panjim has been unscientifically developed to cater to the economic development of the society. A healthy environment is basic to a healthy life and as solid waste management is amongst the many issues adversely affecting Panjim, it needs to be addressed on a priority basis.
As Panjim suffocated under garbage woes, the city garbage got dumped at various sites: around Old Goa, near the Kadamba plateau, at Merces in the low lying marshy areas and Curca. Panjimites also ignored the haphazard dumping of garbage at sites like Campal parade ground near the Home Science College and the YMCA, at Tonca, near the sewage treatment plant, entire Patto Plaza, which was a mangrove area and the Taleigao plateau, close to Goa University. Even Ourem creek and St. Inez creek are victims of garbage dumping; thus converting the entire marshy land and estuarine water bodies into a real estate extravaganza, all sitting on garbage dumps. Even the old Portuguese drainage system carrying monsoon waters from Altinho Hill into River Mandovi are today blocked and choked with construction material and garbage.
Meanwhile, as dumping garbage was unscientific, CCP decided to set up a scientific Common Solid Waste Management Plant at Bainguinim. Interestingly, the site was identified in 2006 and finance was sanctioned to acquire the 1,70,000 sqm land at Bainguinim. Once the procedure was completed and payments made in 2009, it was mandatory for the TCP Department to have sealed the boundaries and 500 meters further on from the site as buffer zone.
Records show that CCP wrote to TCP and panchayats surrounding the site not to allow construction around the site earmarked for garbage treatment. But this did not happen and mega projects came up in the vicinity of the site. The guilty “ both politicians and bureaucrats need to be identified and punished.
The first to be issued a license was the temple and soon after, a school was allowed to be constructed.
During project finalization, I was both a consultant for the CCP as well as a member of the sub-committee of JNNURM.
The main steering committee under CM Digambar Kamat and minister Joaquim Alemao approved the Tetra Tech USA proposal of SWM in which garbage was to be segregated into non-recyclables like plastics which was to be turned into Refuge Derived Fuels, green woody wastes and leaves of shrubs into green fuel and household wastes and kitchen wastes from restaurants to be converted into bio-fertilizers, compost and soil amendment additives by the world class “Windrow system of treatment”.
Unlike what we see at Saligao SWM facility, the bio-fertiliser generated was to be analysed and tested by field trials, as Tetra Tech garbage plant had earmarked space for laboratory set up, and field trials for growing in house vegetables and horticultural crops on the compost generated in the plant at Bainguinim.
The windrow technology is not a capital intensive project and the total cost of plant, machinery, laboratories only was about Rs 60 crores. The entire amount was to be borne by the UPA government at the Centre with CCP having to pay absolutely nothing. But then the Digambar Kamat government fell in 2012 and Manohar Parrikar shelved almost all the then sanctioned projects under JNNURM including the SWM facility at Bainguinim.
The then CCP Commissioner Sanjith Rodrigues threw cold water on the Tetra Tech Project and gave it a final burial with the consultants of Tetra Tech being shown the door. Today a Rs.400 crore facility for garbage treatment is a capital intensive facility at Saligao, which in reality a “White Elephant” with Goans having to pay about Rs. 14 lakhs for each day the plant works, and the load of the expenditure is being borne by the tax payer.
In the meantime, on the Kadamba plateau around the SWM plant, mega builders from across India started purchasing huge tracts of land close to the site the garbage plant was to come, between 2012 to date. The mega housing complexes like Casa Amora, Esmeralda, Navare Developers, Four Seasons Perela, Mystic Blue Kadamba, Gera, River of Joy, Reheja Corp, Viva Goa, Healthway Hospital, Fern Kadamba, with high rise buildings started coming up rapidly converting the Kadamba plateau into an urban settlement zone from a desolate location meant for SWM only.
The builders reaped rich harvest and the neo residents of the Kadamba settlements too got homes for themselves, relatively cheaply. A desolate barren land where garbage was even dumped soon got a value. The High Court of Bombay, Goa bench had already given a go ahead signal but the lazy residents of Panjim did nothing to needle the establishment for the much needed Bainguinim facility.
If the plant to treat garbage is deemed unsuitable by those opposing the plant no other place better than Bainguinim would ever be identified leaving Goa unto utter mismanagement and decay, as the entire territory of Goa today is urbanized or sold to the devils that be.
We Panjimites need to wake up and learn from those now neo residents of Kadamba plateau how to fight in self-interest. Sadly, Panjimites only cry for themselves and not for holistic and sustainable development of Panjim and the surrounding villages of Santa Cruz, Taleigao, Merces, Curca and Agassaim.
