A couple of weekends ago, our household was rudely awoken in the early hours (0510 hours to be precise) of the morning by repeated, insistent ear-splitting blasts from a klaxon air horn. The culprit was the driver of an Andhra Pradesh registration bus. He was trying to draw the attention of his straggling passengers winding their way back from a hedonistic night at the casinos. They ambled over in twos and threes, oblivious to the driver’s impatience, and the disturbance of the peace they had engendered.
There’s more. Once all the passengers were on board, the driver, rather than follow the traffic flow, preferred to steer the bus up the new Patto bridge at full clip against oncoming traffic, and then clamber over the grassy divider to get to the road leading out of Panjim. The bus lurched drunkenly, dangerously, scraping a tree as it did so, as the passengers whooped triumphantly inside. They were in Goa after all, where ‘kuchch bhi chalta hai’ with no-one to stop them.
This is just the most recent, glaring example of the pervasive lawlessness in our capital city. You may see the occasional traffic policeman at some intersections, but even a couple of yards away, traffic rules are being flouted with impunity, not just by clueless (or not that clueless) tourists, but even by locals who surely know better. It has now become par for the course to see two-wheelers and even four-wheelers whizzing the wrong way into oncoming traffic.
The same ‘anything goes’ mentality gets extended to haphazard parking. There is paid parking in selected areas of Panjim, true, which does help matters in those stretches. But in practical terms, those who avoid paying for parking end up congesting the areas where paid parking isn’t enforced, just a street or block away, Narrow side-lanes get effectively narrowed even further.
The problem is compounded by the quantum leap in the year-round influx of tourists, increasing not just footfalls but vehicular traffic and further crowding out already limited parking spaces in the city.
So much of Panjim’s traffic woes would be solved by the simple expedient of a good, reliable, affordable public transport system. It would decongest the city, be cheaper on the pocket for commuters, reduce emissions, be eco-friendlier and improve air quality, and in general make our Panjim so much more pleasant to live in and walk around in. It is difficult even for the able-bodied to walk in Panjim without having to squeeze between parked vehicles as one steps off some footpaths to cross a road. Such a simple solution, but successive governments do not address this.
An additional contribution to the present chaos is the massive digging up of roads (an earlier edition of this newspaper fittingly compared the resultant hubris to a “war zone”) all over Panjim, blocking off access to arterial roads and to smaller lanes, causing huge inconvenience to commuters and residents alike. We’re told that this is due to crucial overhauling of the city’s sewerage system and part of the ‘Smart City’ initiative.
One isn’t questioning the necessity of public works. But in a saner world, such a massive project would have been done in a phased manner, and the work begun and completed as rapidly as possible and the road repair also done as part of the project, to cause minimum inconvenience to the public. Instead, we have huge ‘lunar’ craters cordoned off for weeks, sometimes months on end, and even when the work is finally done, the road is left unpaved, with little humps and bumps as little mementos of the shoddy work finally ‘completed’.
But the bureaucratic logic seems to be that residents are low priority with a high tolerance for incompetence (we’ve borne it for decades, haven’t we, with regular booster doses inflicted over time to keep that ‘tolerance’ going) but God forbid if our ‘guests’, the visitors to Goa, be they tourists or delegates to IFFI or Serendipity, have to suffer any of this. All the focus is on keeping those areas as presentable as possible. Are even they being fooled by the charade?
If one listens to tourism stake-holders, both within the government and beyond, the focus seems to be only on increasing footfalls, but with little or no thought to whether our miniscule capital city has the capacity to absorb the ever-increasing load. One is told that our garbage collection system is overworked and understaffed to handle even the present load. How can we possibly contemplate adding to this? When garbage and litter pile up in the streets, the unsightliness is something that residents have to endure, as well as the public health consequences. We’ve had dengue and chikungunya outbreaks in our residential area, with two members of my own family afflicted by one of each. Who does one hold accountable for the resultant morbidity, suffering and loss to productivity and income? Does the buck stop with anyone at all? Are we mere voters, meant only to vote politicians and parties to power, pay our taxes and get zero governance in return?
To add insult to injury, even further mayhem is being planned. For one, Goa Tourism Development Corporation’s (GTDC) ropeway project linking Panjim to Reis Magos, which alone is predicted to bring in an additional “2 to 3 million visitors annually.” It shouldn’t even have been a consideration as our tiny capital city cannot handle this, by virtue of its small size. Secondly, we the residents are never even consulted before such madcap projects are even at gestation stage. The same goes for other projects like the jetty policy, which have just the tourists and casino industry as beneficiaries at huge detriment not only to the quality of life of residents but to the environment.
It’s time we residents reclaimed our right to determine how we want Panjim to be, for now and for the future.
(Dr Luis Dias is a physician, musician, writer and founder of Child’s Play
India Foundation)