Most of the Goan villages are flooded with migrants coming in from the neighboring states. To get easy money almost every household tries to supplement its income by keeping these migrants on rent in their backyards or courtyards even in the absence of basic toilet facility leave aside garbage disposal and other facilities .
These migrants sometimes has become a cause of social concerns in the villages as the graphs of burglaries and crimes has shown an upward trend in these years. Local hygiene has also become a major concern in absence of toilets and littered garbage. Though the government has made it mandatory to file migrants information forms with the local police station and the concerned panchayats, this has not deterred to control the large scale in migration in the villages. The local police has also found it difficult to implement the law which remained only on paper.
The large number of migrants has added to the woes of the majority of locals and does not, in any way, help the panchayat financially. There is no law by which the panchayat is empowered to collect one month’s rental from the owners of the premises. Most of premises are illegally built without construction licenses and the slow arm of the law has failed to control and take action.
A suggestion to curb and control this issue could be to bring in amendments in the Act (1) To make it mandatory for owners of premises to take permissions from the village panchayat before keeping any tenants and pay one month rent and upon failure to do so empower the panchayat to file police complaints for violation against the owners who has illegally kept the tenant without its permission. (2) Make it mandatory for the sarpanch and the concerned ward members to be a watchdog and suo motto file a police complaint and upon failure make them liable to lose membership for dereliction of duties upon receipt of even a single complaint from the residents at the BDO’s office after conducting a minimum inquiry of the facts of the case.
