I was shocked and dismayed by the roads in Nagaland, the first time I visited that very beautiful State alongside India’s border with Myanmar. It was easy to fly 3000 kilometres from Dabolim to Dimapur, but almost every inch onwards became an excruciating ordeal because of abysmal roads.
The situation was maddening - amazing people and places to visit, but only after great suffering to get to them. It was years ago, but I still recall telling my friends that such criminal misgovernance could never happen in Goa, with its far higher levels of wealth and education, where more advanced civic values were enshrined over generations. I was totally wrong, of course.
Roads don’t lie. They are hard evidence, and speak volumes about state priorities. Here in Goa, where wanton party hopping has rendered political ideology passé, the people’s mandate rests on the quality of governance.
But there is little reliable data to give us the full picture, which makes the evidence of our own eyes even more important. How do we experience the roads? Do they help or hinder us? What do they reveal about state priorities?
“It can be quite depressing to go on the roads into, say, Panjim,” says Edgar Ribeiro, the distinguished former Chief Planner of the Government of India – he will be 94 on Christmas Day – who has an encyclopaedic understanding of the planning framework that governs the right of way in the country, and was kind enough to give me an invaluable over-the-telephone precis of how things work both in theory and practice.
He told me the chaos on the roads in Goa is due to “a total failure of procedure. We have the laws. We know the rules, but governance has broken down. The local MLAs are playing the fool. My experience in working on the Regional Plan 2021 is they tend to act as competitors, not colleagues, when it comes to land use. The result is anarchy. Goa should never have become a state. We would have been better off remaining a Union Territory.”
Ribeiro says only Goa has been permitted to build national highways within less than 80 metres corridor and most of these major arteries have been extensively rebuilt and improved over the past decade, even if the same cannot be said about state highways, district roads, and what the government calls “other district roads.”
He says, “Today in Goa, the main issue is not development, but sustainable development. That is how we have to think, but it is being constantly undermined. Look at the new highway from Panjim to Ponda which should have been properly regulated, but instead, even while under construction, you could see the big real state players come on the ground. They pre-empted the right agenda.”
If you consider success stories from “off the beaten track”, one stellar example is at Benaulim, where Chef Avinash Martins elevates traditional Goan foods and flavours into dazzling haute cuisine at Cavatina, amongst the best restaurants in South Asia.
He told me the roads he uses to get to his restaurant from Margao are excellent, and the same is true of most of the routes to his ancestral home in Velim. But the roads near the Velim church “have been a rollercoaster, because they have been dug up for cable lines, and there was no filling done properly, a very bad job. We have been concerned for our safety because they could be a deathtrap.”
Nonetheless, he reports that more people find it easier to reach Cavatina, thanks to the new highway and “if you travel into the hinterlands, as I do very often, I feel the roads are far better than they used to be.”
According to Blaise Costabir, the Managing Director of GMI Zarhak Moulders at Verna, there is no doubt “road infrastructure in Goa has improved drastically over the past 30 years” but the problem is “our driving etiquette has not kept pace and we are worse off as a result.”
He says, “I believe the way we behave on the roads reflects our society. We are lawless, and the government is not bothered about it. We do not follow signals, drive on the correct side, or wear seat belts. We drive drunk, overloaded and are lenient to underage driving, all under watchful eyes of the authorities.”
“Nothing about this is going to change because just stand outside a school, and see what Gen Next is experiencing. Even as parents drop their kids to school, they are showing them it is okay to break traffic rules,” he adds.
How does the evidence of Goa’s roads contrast with other parts of the country and world? Ace entrepreneur Varun Chawla – he co-founded My Guest House and 91 Springboard amongst others – whose “creative, conscientious, community empowered startup studio build3” is based in Candolim, said the new highways and bridges built in Goa over the seven years he’s been living here “gave us a lot more space, and originally the quality was very good”.
“But it seems like the top layer has degraded rather quickly in many spots, such that I’ve seen the roads shut down for maintenance and potholes seem more common than they would be in Hong Kong or the US or in Europe, where roads just seem to be better maintained, or better created. I’m not a specialist, but it does seem like it's not the same standard,” Chawla said.
Chawla told me, “I feel like there’s progress being made, but somewhere there seems to be a quality deficit. The technology exists and funds are available. But something is going wrong. If we could spend 5 or 10 per cent more energy in choosing better technology, better materials, and doing the work with better efficiency such that it doesn’t have to be redone, or constantly refixed, that would be a worthwhile endeavour.” The way things are going, “travelling around Goa is less of a joy”.
“We get stuck in traffic, encounter dust and construction, and badly potholed roads. My commute from Bambolim to Candolim has gone from 30 or 40 minutes to an hour or even 90 minutes. That is making things not very different from Delhi, where I used to live, and where I would avoid going out unless I absolutely had to, and all my spare time wound up being spent at home. Then you end up with the Swiggy, Netflix Zomato life, which somehow just doesn't feel like the life we all deserve,” he said.
(Vivek Menezes is a
writer and co-founder
of the Goa Arts and
Literature Festival)