Even worse than the shockingly incompetent brutalization of Panjim’s interior roads and public spaces is the badly planned and even worse executed orgy of destruction underway on the city’s ancient riverfront. This hugely damaging new blitzkrieg of concrete is unsustainable and hideously inappropriate, delivering the opposite of what is being sold as ‘restoration and protection’. Instead, hundreds of precious trees have been mowed down in the last remaining casuarina groves, and an entire mountainside of huge rocks piled on the sands from Campal through to Miramar and beyond.
By now, of course, residents of Goa’s capital have endured many unbelievably stupid Smart City antics, where vast pots of money disappear while the quality of life keeps deteriorating. Still, even by these very poor standards and criminal lack of accountability, the madness at Miramar stands out because it’s happening for the second time in rapid succession. As recently as November 17, 2021, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant inaugurated the previous high-expenditure ‘Beautification of beachfront promenade at Miramar’ while expressing great pride that “no trees have been cut” – actually many had been – as “people feel sad when they visit the beach and see cut trees.” Less than two years later, everything showcased then is crumbling to junk – even the signage has embarrassingly fallen apart – while more concrete cleaves to the waterline, with hundreds of trees lost to the bulldozers.
All aspects of this debacle are excruciating for Goa – and especially painful for residents of Miramar like me – but it is true the same is happening elsewhere too, with widespread allegations against Smart City shenanigans in numerous locations: Pune, Jalandhar, Chennai and Shillong. Chandrasekaran Balakrishnan of the Centre for Public Policy Research points to a “trend of deep apathy towards sound reasoning as well as principled approach to making public policy processes work” and “a huge mismatch between the scale of aspirations of people in general and youth in particular and the infrastructure quality of the cities in the country. With the presence of vested interests, rent-seekers and cronies, the transformation of cities along with the aspirations of people has become impossible.”
Balakrishnan says urban renewal projects should observe the Union Ministry of Urban Development’s 2016 notification “to create a City-Level Advisory Forum (CLAF) comprising all major stakeholders including elected representatives of that city, local youth, technical experts, associations of taxpayers, residents’ welfare, trade and commerce associations, etc.” These “were all crucial and would have played a critical role to bring out the much-needed projects at city-level and ward-level with sustainable models.” But that has never happened so “the smart cities ecosystem of public policy-making has become more riddled with new silos which always operate ad-hoc, out of desperation for rent-seeking or things cooked up on self-made priority and the needs not identified by the expert committees or based on independent research.” In the end, “the aspirations of people—especially the younger generation upon which the nation banks its trust—would not be fulfilled even after a few generations.”
That sorry plight is made worse here, says Goa College of Architecture professor Vishvesh Kandolkar – he is also the programme coordinator for its excellent M Arch degree in Urban Design – because India’s smallest state is perceived and treated as ‘a pleasure periphery.’ In his paper entitled ‘Tourism’s unsustainable consumption of Goa’, he writes “Goa is at once India, but not quite – localized as a nearby neighbourhood, yet maintained as a space of otherness. By turning Goa into India’s neighbouring getaway, [the development model being imposed on the state] privileges the desires of elite consumers over the immediate needs of Goa’s own people [and] seen as a land where the people are not part of its distinctness – they can be erased and replaced – while their culture and their land are appropriated.”
In fact, this is precisely what is happening along the Mandovi from Patto to Dona Paula, and best understood as the rampant ‘casinofication’ of every available inch of public land. While many city residents do avail of increased and better access to the river, that is both accidental and secondary to the main goals of appropriation, privatization, the distribution of spoils to insiders and cronies (see the astonishing expansion of Panjim Gymkhana) and the constant raising of fresh barriers to impede democratic access. Over the phone earlier this week, Prof Kandolkar told me “everything being done is an assault on the commons, in an old – and failed – model that has been imported from the west, where the fundamental rights of the mass of citizens are degraded in favour of something that can be easily consumed by the elites and urban middle class.”
Kandolkar points to many gaps – both conceptual and practical – in the slipshod ‘development’ shattering Panjim’s resilience to climate change, and imposing flawed ideas to disrupt one of India’s most intricately evolved urban landscapes. The most crucial factor, he feels (and I agree) is the enforced absence of community participation: “once you disenfranchise the residents who care about their surroundings, and deprive them of any stake in looking after what is being built, everything deteriorates from there. This is why a lot of emphasis – and budget – must be reserved for post-project use, because there will always be the possibility to improve.” In addition, “small is the way to go in cities like Panjim” where “100 small projects that connect with each other are much better than one big one.” If small projects fail, they can be improved relatively easily, but when grandiose ideas flop – as we see every day in Goa – the harm is permanent.
“Goa was never a bottoms up deliberative democratic society at the best of times,” says Fernando Velho, an architect and writer who is also on the faculty at Goa College of Architecture. This young scion of old Panjim reminds us that civil society never really had much say in the city’s development, however, “today, in keeping with national trends, it has taken a sharp illiberal turn where even a semblance of dialogue between civil society and the government does not exist. Instead, its citizens are bombarded on a near daily basis with a series of manufactured events to distract and divert attention. This gives planners space to quickly push through very questionable and poorly executed infrastructure projects, at the cost of the wellbeing of its citizens and the environment.”
Earlier this week, Velho and I took a sorrowful walk together on the latest cement monstrosity being laid out on the sand at Miramar, with the lasting disgrace of the previous walkway right next to it. A few workers were cutting flagstones there, and we were aghast to note they had no protective equipment, working barefoot and bare-handed without eyewear. Perfectly understandably given those abysmal (and illegal) conditions, their handiwork is visibly poor, and looks guaranteed to fall apart almost immediately. Velho told me, “when the voices of the citizens are drowned out of the public sphere, how can authorities ever be held accountable for wasteful shoddy work like this? Poorly planned and executed infrastructure is directly proportional to the lack of democratic accountability.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival)