SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 2024
Wesley Edward Pereira
In the terms of reference of Mopa Airport technical consultancy bid document (September 2010) to prepare the project master plan and preliminary project report, it is clearly stated that Belgaum, Hubli, Karwar and Dharwad are in Goa. It is further mentioned in the Terms of Reference of the September 2010 bid document that location of Mopa is suitable for the large-scale project that Goa wishes to launch for benefiting towns and cities such as Sangli, Sindhudurg, Ratnagiri and Kolhapur in Maharashtra. Mopa Airport is proposed to be developed in four phases.
In the year 2012, the hypothetical draft Master Plan of Mopa Airport and the hypothetical Goa Vision Document-2035 were prepared, without defining the Goa Metropolitan Region in terms of human population and land-use plans showing transportation connectivity.
Mopa Airport is required to promote massive commercial development projects in the tiny rural-urban State of Goa and these projects are linked to the unsustainable hidden multi-modal transportation land-use plans (air, road, rail/metro, national waterways and jetties).
14 Coastal Economic Zones (CEZs) have been identified along the coastline of India as per the National Perspective Plan report dated April 2016 of the Sagarmala Project. Each of these CEZs is mapped to the nearby ports. The State of Goa is included in the Coastal Economic Zone (CEZ) of South Konkan-Maharashtra under the Sagarmala project.
The Bharatmala Pariyojna attempts to notify the existing National Highways in Goa as Economic Corridors with massive road right-of-way. The fancy 8-lane new Zuari Bridge and the New Mandovi Bridge having connectivity to National Highway NH-17 (Patradevi to Polem) and National Highway NH-4A (Molem to Panjim) are components of the massive economic corridors in Goa. The economic corridors have to be connected to inter-corridor and feeder roads for the success of the project.
In the investment and other policy documents of the State of Goa, neither a Goan nor a person of Goan origin is defined. The Goa Bhumiputra Adhikarini (GBA) Bill,2021 is linked to the process to convert the tiny rural-urban State of Goa into a metropolitan logistic hub for promoting urban townships through 30-years hidden city development plans, to meet the requirements of second/multiple home tourists, so-called homeless organised migrant beggars and for the massive influx of migrant workers. The so-called Special Purpose vehicle (SPV) formed by the Mopa Airport Build Operate Transfer (BOT) Contractor is not an independent institutional authority. Hence, this so-called SPV cannot perform the role of Special Planning Authority similar to the role performed by the mandated independent Special Planning Authority CIDCO on the proposed Navi Mumbai Greenfield International Airport.
Goa is too small to implement unsustainable master plans for creating multimodal logistic hubs with urban townships.
