THURSDAY, APRIL 25, 2024
Sujay Gupta
The widening schism between the people and State over the process of finalising the draft Coastal Zone Management Plan has taken the contours of a more disturbing trend. There is a deep line drawn between the people and the government, at least in the villages of South Goa if not in the entire State. The angst of the people is more pronounced in the southern part of the State because of the allied factors that make the CZMP so very critical.
The looming threat of the Major Ports bill empowering the MPT of having the last word on any decision in their repositioned jurisdiction and the three linear projects running through swathes of their territory and cutting through the Mollem national park like a knife has indirectly caused a massive insurmountable trust deficit.
Taking off from last week, the focus this time is to look at what, as expected, turned out to be farcical hearing, and called a “public hearing” by the district authorities when in effect it violated every tangible rule or norm which is a precondition to conducting such hearings.
A detailed reading of the minutes of the “public hearing” held on March 7 in South Goa (it was held at North Goa as well at the Kala Academy at Panjim) shows that the District Authorities concluded that a Public Hearing was held. The last line of the minutes of the South Goa meeting stated “The Public Hearing concluded at 17.10 hrs”.
But scrutiny of the deliberations at the meeting and the points raised by several of those who succinctly argued why this hearing cannot be justified as true and legit, itself questioned the conclusion that a public hearing was held.
There are valid and tangible grounds to conclude that this was no hearing at all. This was, by no stretch of the imagination, a public hearing. Nor was it a ‘private hearing’.
In effect it really was an attempt to pass this off as a public hearing to cross the technical need to get public opinion and hear people’s views and register them before, putting a stamp of approval to an ill-conceived plan with no real public consultation.
The learned, we are sure, Dr Manik Mahapatra from the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management, the Chennai based agency which has inked the Draft CZMP, said that all village level maps were finalised in consultation with the village panchayats. His word is held against the words of panchayat after panchayat which have made two serious observations a) That the village plans were not uploaded on the concerned website for people to study and b) In a landscape of South Goa where there are 155 villagers and large communities with no real access to Internet connectivity, or the ability to read maps online, how does one expect villagers to be armed with data and information to effectively participate in a public hearing?
The minutes of this meeting records the following: Olencio Simoes of the Goenchea Raponnkarancho Ekvott said that “the present public hearing is in violation of the norms of a public hearing”. He requested that many members of the fishing community were outside and they should be allowed to participate in the public consultation. The minutes quote Simoes as stating “The fishing community comes from the weaker section of society and are not conversant with the English language. Hence the plan and notices had to be in the local language. The present process is favourable to the affluent communities having all facilities and understanding of computers and IT.”
With such a strong and valid presentation of so much unfairness towards the fishing community and by extension the weaker sections, as recorded in the minutes, under no circumstances could this public hearing pass the test of legality and fairness.
The entire exercise on March 7 was reduced to it being a confrontation between the government which was clearly blind-sighted into brooking no reasoning other than pushing the fact this was indeed a “public hearing” even though this hearing did not tick off any of the fundamental boxes needed, i.e. making all data available to all people to allow meaningful objections and secondly, allowing everyone to “hear” the hearing.
The purported reasoning advanced by the government was that there were COVID related restrictions. This brings us to how the government is actually handling the COVID scare. It isn’t. There is absolute freedom of movement, Goa is one of the few airports where passengers can land and enter like a breeze and yet need an all-clear COVID negative certificate from Goa when they land back in COVID hotspots like Mumbai and Delhi. Then there are weddings of high profile families held with virtually no safeguards which have led to cases of COVID erupting and families being forced to quarantine.
For all these reasons above, it is clear that such a hearing should have been postponed if the intention was indeed to hear the people.
It is shocking how such a critical hearing which would impact lives, livelihoods and futures of generations of Goans was concluded with such brazenness on the ground that opportunities were given to people. But these opportunities are not largesse or favours. These are rights and these rights become complete only when this opportunity is presented on the foundation of access and availability of data and proper dissemination of information to the lowest in the chain, who is unable to comprehend data and maps.
This attitude is, however, not surprising. It re-establishes the narrative of ‘otherisation’ and prejudice between the people and who they elect. And this prejudice is unfortunate. Instead of taking the voice of the disadvantaged (the people) to the powerful (the government), the administration is working in the opposite direction. It is taking the soft diktat of the government to the people and doing all it can to make the people fall in line.
No government can take on the people with prejudices that go against them. People will not accept, as Dr Claude Alvares of Goa Foundation said: “An obituary or a funeral notice” in the shape of the present Draft CZMP.
