The Chief Minister of Goa is suddenly determined to provide affordable housing to Goans, and also, believe it or not, to protect Goan land. From whom, one is tempted to ask – himself? Yes, even as the entire state is being converted into the luxury holiday home of rich Indians under his supervision, CM Pramod Sawant would have us believe that his government is busy creating a scheme of low-cost housing in every taluka for Goans, with about 50-100 flats to be built and offered to native Goans at about 10-15 lakh rupees each. Along with this announcement came another, hiking land prices in Pernem and Bardez by a whopping 130%, which, according to him, will ‘curb massive development’ in these areas.
Now the price hike makes sense for this government – not about curbing development, of course – but in terms of more profits, white and black, for everyone involved. But this is a CM who has never expressed any interest in Goa’s housing problems, not even when complaints, including the very common denial of permission to expand village houses or build new toilets, etc, have hit the headlines. It is not surprising then, that nobody is taking his promise of affordable housing seriously, seeing it, in fact, as just an attempt at bribery. Even as his builder friends cut the hills, forests, and fields of Goa, and cover it all with concrete, our concerned CM will basically ensure that some crumbs of real estate fall to ordinary Goans, in return for which we would all be expected to forget the reports about Daffodil’s villas, Bhutani’s swimming pools, Lodha’s conquests, the land-grabbing Chief Secretary, the landgrab-facilitating DGP, the embezzling Smart City CEO, etc, etc.
We are, nonetheless, glad that the CM has, for whatever reason, brought up the issue of affordable housing. And we would like to remind him that there is no need to build afresh to solve this issue – because there are already hundreds, if not more, of quality Goan residences without any occupants. Some of them are waiting for buyers, some of them belong to investors, while others are second (or tenth) homes, used for barely one or two weeks in the year. According to Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Heather P. Bedi and Solano Da Silva (Goa’s Great Land Grab, 2023), a whopping 22%, i.e. over one-fifth, of Goa’s housing stock stood vacant almost 100% of the time, in 2011. So, all that is required is to just take over this stock and offer it to Goans for 10-15 lakhs, as promised.
Sawant will never do this, of course. These posh apartments and sea-viewing villas are surely not what he envisages as cheap housing for Goans; those are for India’s metropolitan elites. Cheap housing for ordinary Goans, in contrast, will probably mean cheap construction along with poor facilities, poor location, poor everything.
But even if we give him the benefit of doubt, the proposal of affordable housing still makes no sense given the context of today’s Goa. It reminds one of the new public buses recently introduced in Panjim. The new buses (and bus-routes) are comfortable, smooth and more eco-friendly than the earlier buses, definitely a boon for the poorer sections of Panjim’s population. But they are running half-empty much of the time, and very slow as well. The reason is again the context, which is completely against any public good.
If people can freely use private vehicles – despite the traffic jams, pollution, and deaths on the roads – how many will voluntarily shift to buses? Doesn’t the municipal corporation know that one to reduce the existing traffic while introducing new vehicles? At the very least, there should have been a ban on ‘monster cars’ as The Economist calls them. In an article titled ‘What to do about America’s killer cars’ (5 September 2024), the journal points out that big cars, which are popular in the US at least partly because they are believed to keep the users safe in any crash, are horribly dangerous for everyone else on the street. This is true for Goa as well. Remember Banastarim? When that huge, super-luxury, and super-speedy Mercedes SUV ploughed into multiple vehicles, its occupants did not even suffer even a scratch, but left 3 persons dead and many more grievously injured.
What we need is a complete ban on such big vehicles, and restrictions on all others (like compulsory car-pooling and dedicated bus lanes). Not just throwing more buses into the dangerous chaos that are Goan roads today.
And when such restrictions come in, we need new buses not just in Panjim, but all over Goa. There are women who travel standing all the way from Pernem to Panjim, every single day, in ancient buses which are not just packed but leaking in the monsoons, and frequently breaking down along the way. Don’t they deserve better transport? Or is it all just about the myth of the Smart City; public transport tick-marked as done, expenditure shown, even if the transport is hardly used?
The point is that offering mass transport, or mass housing, within the same unchanged and very rotten context is guaranteed to fail. You cannot have successful public transport without restricting private transport, just like you cannot have successful mass housing without restricting the opposite kinds of housing. Mass housing has to go hand in hand with a ban on luxurious, wasteful, environmentally-destructive, and hardly-used housing, which also keep house prices high and out of the reach of most Goans. Just adding cheap mass housing to the tsunami of luxury-apartment, gated-villa, individual-swimming-pools and private-golf-courses already ravaging Goa is going to worsen things.
So, first a ban on all such construction projects, Mr. Sawant, and a take-over of unused or hardly-used residences, to be sold at your rate to Goans.
Affordable mass housing is a great idea, which should be implemented genuinely and in an environmentally conscious manner; not a sop behind which the destructive rampage continues.
(Amita Kanekar is an architectural historian
and novelist)