The Corporation of the City of Panjim, the agencies executing road digging work and the government of Goa, need to be held in contempt of the Bombay High Court order of last week, ruling that well maintained motor able roads are a fundamental right of every citizen.
In Panjim as well as in its most major towns, this right has been surrendered at the altar of the government, the corporation and the chief digging body of the state, the Goa State Infrastructure Development Corporation. The people of Goa have suffered, protested and gotten angry and then given up. The manner in which the digging of the Dona Paula-Miramar road has been forced upon the people of Panjim with blatant false promises is shocking. A division bench of the High Court of Bombay at Goa had directed the Goa government to stop further digging of the Miramar-Dona Paula Road, unless essential. The government has always found means to term each digging as essential. The Miramar-Dona Paula road was hot-mixed in January 2014 at a cost of Rs 1.63 crore, and then dug up by the Goa State Infrastructure Development Corporation (GSIDC) to concretise it at a cost of Rs 84.63 crore in less than a month. On October 30, 2014 GSIDC officials said that the concretizing the excavated portions of the roads would be completed by December that year. The exact words of a GSIDC official on October 30, reported by the press were “Concretizing of the Miramar-Dona Paula road will begin within a day and concretizing of the Dona Paula-Raj Bhavan road will be taken up on coming Monday. The road from the Dona Paula circle to the jetty will be laid with cobblestones and that work will also begin soon”.
Far from laying cobble stones, long term residents who live between the Dona Paula Road and the jetty were trapped in their houses with the road that passes in front cut and dug to pieces. For two weeks in April, Ms Ruth Aguiar, in her seventies, had to jump over a neighbour’s boundary wall to get to her own house. While family members were cynical and even afraid, Ms Aguiar fought with authorities to get access to her house back. She broke down and cried but fought on. The roads of Panjim – and others parts of Goa, are laid not with cobble stones. They are huge craters, outside of which rises the volcano of peoples anger and frustration.
Herald has been on this never ending story which has gotten into a pattern. Roads are periodically dug open, after which explanations are given for opening up the road and deadlines are given for an end to the misery. The explanation are hardly swallowed by the people and the deadlines are always failed.
There can be no justification plausible for the people of Panjim when a main thoroughfare (Dona Paula-Miramar) is dug and destroyed for year, because it is a part of the new Panim master plan. This is followed by a systematic and repeated digging of all roads periodically by different agencies operating on each road. The latest shocker is that a portion of the road near Caranzalem has been dug to connect a storm water drain to a building. Why wasn’t this done when the building was being constructed and there was far less traffic congestion?
While these stories can be found across the state, the mess is showcased in all its ugliness in Panjim. It was a nice and very beautiful town. Layer by layer, it is being stripped off its glory, as nothing but greed has possessed those who run this town. If Panjim is the epicentre of this greed, the rest of Goa is in the immediate periphery. The institutions of the state are taking our towns down.
