Panjim and Margao a study of similarities and contrasts

Against the backdrop of the Union government implementing several missions to change the face of the country’s urban areas, including to make them more liveable it is pertinent to look at what two of Goa’s main urban centres have to offer. It is also relevant for this column’s argument to note that a liveability index of States by a national magazine last year, ranked Goa at number 9, just ahead of Mizoram.

A couple of weeks ago Panjim celebrated its 175th anniversary as a capital city and last week Margao had its 240th birthday as a town, a milestone that went largely unnoticed in the town and the rest of the State. When we look, therefore, at Panjim and Margao we are looking a town that are not ancient, but compared to some many exisiting urban centres, relatively young, so some measure of planning must have gone into the creation of Panjim and Margao.

Panjim was a planned city, built for a population and transportation modes of two centuries ago. From a ward of a village to a town and hence the capital of the then colonial power, to now the State capital, Panjim has grown exponentially in the past three decades, it’s carrying capacity never having been taken into consideration as it expanded. The city, rather than spreading its boundaries to include its neighbouring villages, has grown inward, with the city having been forced to put added pressure on its existing infrastructure as attempts to draft the surrounding areas has met with resistance.

Take for instance what occurred when the Panjim Municipal Council was upgraded to a municipal corporation. The proposal to incorporate Taleigao and villages from across the River Mandovi, where the State Legislative Assembly and Secretariat are today housed, into the new corporation was set aside as villagers opposed it. Yet, Taleigao today is a burgeoning residential suburb of Panjim, it’s paddy fields sprouting housing colonies with fancy palm shrubs for decorative purposes alongside colonial period architecture houses with coconut palms that bear fruit.

Margao, on the other hand, grew out of compulsion from a village to a town and when a railway line came through got tagged as the commercial capital of Goa, a nomenclature that is still often used to describe the town. It has spread its reach with housing colonies in Fatorda,  Ambaji and Gogol, though the infrastructure of the town’s centre has not changed much. Not even when the Konkan Railway chugged in and Margao became an important junction for the new railway line and the existing south west railway line, did the infrastructure of the town get augmented.

What Goa’s two major towns have today is an unblended mix of residential, commercial, institutional and government areas, almost battling for the limited space that is available. Where Panjim is concerned, the only area in planning that is completely set aside for commercial and government purposes is the Patto area across the Ourem Creek  and in Margao it is the SGPDA area that is again commercial and government offices. In the rest of the two towns there can be found residences, commercial establishments, government offices in close proximity, sometimes even in the same building, with even liquor shops coexisting in some edifices.

Yet, when we look at the Patto and the SGPDA area, there is a certain strangeness that is observed that is not in sync with the rest of the city and town. It is the absence of trees in the areas. Compare this with the tree lined streets of Panjim and old areas of the town of Margao, that have large tress, hundreds of years old giving not just shade but also improving the air quality of the urban area. Any authority looking to improve the liveability standard of Panjim or Margao, or any other town in the State, has to first look at the cheap option of planting more trees, a move that should not meet with any opposition. Instead we have the twisted understanding of development to mean concrete structures that do not improve the quality of life.

In planning, it is best to adopt certain principles that have proved to be successful elsewhere in the country and the world. Look at how urban areas are planned in developed countries. Most cities would have demarcated sectors for residential and for commercial purposes, and other areas set aside for institutional purposes, with some areas having a mix of both or all three, but these last would be few. It is also not easy to circumvent these planning guidelines, and any developer seeking approval for a construction would have his project report scrutinised for availability of other services like power and water supply, sewerage systems and even roads, and the project approved only if the authority finds that there is adequate infrastructure to serve the new project. 

This does not happen in Goa, resulting often in protests across the State.

An online user-generated database on Quality of Life Index that was released last year had 11 Indian cities in the top 177 cities in the world. At the top of the list of Indian cities was Mangaluru or Mangalore at 48th place, followed by Pune which was ranked 102nd. Behind these two came Hyderabad (116), Coimbatore (131), Bengaluru (132), Ahmedabad (138) and Gurgaon (141), Chennai (160), Delhi (161), 

Mumbai (172), Kolkata (170). No Goan city was listed, but then this was looking at huge urban areas, who population numbers millions, which Panjim and Margao, each would have a population of around a lakh or less. 

How difficult then can it be to plan for Panjim or Margao whose populations are small and so should be easier to handle? All it needs is the will – political and social – to make the change for the better.

Alexandre Moniz Barbosa is Executive Editor, Herald