No small change
Why are bus fares rising twice as fast as fuel prices? Does anyone care to find out, asks ANTHONY SIMOES
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In the quarter century I have spent in Goa, I have seen some rapid changes, slight changes, big ones, slow ones and no changes at all. I am reminded about them often, more so when I travel by bus. I could have seen bigger changes walking on our beaches, but – between the incoming tides, watersports, 300 legal shacks, 300 illegal ones, the River Princess, 2,000 beach beds and 6,000 umbrellas – there is hardly any beach left to walk on. What little is left has to be shared with pariah dogs, stray cattle, Lamanis, Telugu ear cleaners, beggars, ice-cream vendors and hordes of tourists.
To get to the beach I need to take at least two Goa buses. A bus journey, 25 years ago, meant crowded cattle class. One heard Konkani voices, abuses, political commentary, spiritual discourses, gossip, slander, philosophy, news and, without fail, Konkani songs over the music system. Today, on the same buses, Goans are gone. Instead of Konkani one hears Marathi, Kannada, Tulu, Malayalee, Tamil, Telugu, Oriya, Bengali, Urdu, Manipuri, Assamese, Nepali, Maithili, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marwari, as well as Hindi and its myriad dialects… To make matters worse these Charlies all have mobile phones, which makes the music system redundant.
Many of them are itinerant labour, taking advantage of the seasonal nature of employment in our mining and tourism industry. During the monsoons they go back home to work as agricultural labourers. They speak survival Konkani with their own accents, and have adapted quickly. One notices this in their attitude. They wait for the buses wherever it suits them, irrespective of where the bus stop is. Knowing the greed of our bus operators, they stop whenever and wherever they want by a wave of their hands.
In 1986, I paid 60 paise to travel from Mapusa to Panjim by cattle class. Today, it costs Rs10 for the same journey in the same cattle class; with the same pushing and shoving, the same stop-wait-start driving, the same reckless speeding between stops. No tickets are issued and no uniforms worn even today. And who can the migrant worker complain to? The bus operator gives two hoots for locals. He takes his cue from the CM, who told Goan protestors: “I don’t need your votes.”
Between the ‘khas admi’ and the ‘bhaile’, the Goan ‘aam admi’ has become the proverbial meat in the sandwich. From CM to bus conductor, (s)he is treated with contempt and disdain.
The politicians invented vote bank politics instinctively, long before our political scientists discovered it. Go to Moti Dongor and you’ll think you’ve landed in Pakistan. Curchorem/Sanvordem feels like a ghetto transferred, box and dice and all, from Bhatkal. Some parts of Taleigao resemble a locality in Kathmandu.
These guys have monopolised both ends of the economic spectrum. You have the menial labour, and you have the casinos and the fancy hairstyling and ‘Ayurvedic massage’ joints. Both the latter provide fine cover for traffickers, pimps, prostitutes and politicians. Fortunately, we have a home minister who can assure us that Goa is drug-free…
We Goans have become victims of our own envy and pusillanimity. For example, a big bhatkar’s widow who’s rolling in wealth has illegally converted her garages into rooms and rented them out to a Nepali family. The apartment she lives in is part of a society in which the rest of the members are absentee landlords minting money in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, the UK, the US and Canada.
The Nepali has turned the garage into a ‘dharamshala’ for new Nepali migrants till they can find jobs and accommodation. He uses society water for running a laundry in cahoots with the landlady, who gets her pound of flesh. There’s nobody to question her or her son, who is a notorious High Court lawyer-cum-scamster. Her other son and his in-laws specialise in violating CRZ rules, running illegal beach resorts and shacks.
This kind of behaviour is replicated thousands of times all over Goa. And then we wonder how the ‘bhailes’ prosper. They have studied Goans well. They simply leverage our willingness-to-stoop-to-any-level, and make a fast, dishonest buck.
Coming back to our buses, in 25 years fares have gone up by a factor of 17, while diesel prices have gone up by a factor of 8. Fuel costs account for just 50 per cent of bus operating costs. So why are bus fares rising twice as fast as fuel prices? Does anyone care? Our bus operators keep complaining about rising diesel prices. Yet they burn up Rs2 lakh worth of fuel every day, idling their engines at unauthorised stops and bus stands, waiting for customers, in full view of the authorities.
Besides wasting fuel, they cause air pollution and damage their bus engines. But they are not worried because, ultimately, they pass on these costs to the commuter. The same goes for bribes paid in various departments. That is why bus fares increase at twice the rate of fuel price increases. And the ‘khaas admi’ does not travel by bus. QED.
But why target our bus operators? They take their cue from the administration: ‘Jaise Raja, vaise praja’ is the name of the game.
A dozen years ago, the Chief Engineer of Goa’s Electricity Department filed an affidavit in the High Court saying that 40 per cent of the electricity available to the state earns no revenue, because of what he called transmission and distribution (T&D) losses. He explained that the existing conductors are old, and therefore inefficient. But he failed to mention that half these ‘losses’ were because of power theft by bulk industrial users in cahoots with his field staff, bureaucrats, technocrats and the power minister. And who do you think makes up for the deficit? The ‘aam admi’, obviously!
The PWD Chief Engineer, at about the same time, quite shamelessly filed a similar affidavit. He said that only half the water supplied by the PWD was recorded in water meters. The rest, he said, was either given free to poor people through public taps or was lost due to ‘leakages’. Like the Chief Electrical Engineer, for some strange reason, he failed to mention large scale water theft with the blessings of his department personnel and the political patronage of the PWD minister.
Thanks to Goans’ proclivity for their own little scams, they are quite comfortable with this kind of individual and collective amnesia for all kinds of frauds and scams in the state.
Just imagine, for years ‘some people’ collected exorbitant parking fees at a non-existent car park in our capital city! I won’t be surprised if someone like Veenu Bansal starts renting office space to the Russian mafia inside the Police HQ in Panjim…!
+++++
Enough Corruption!
By Venita Coelho
It was so good see Azad Maidan full. At every protest, getting a large enough crowd to make a point is always a problem. But on Sunday the point was more than made – over 1,000 people marched against corruption.
The march was part of a nationwide effort, led by the likes of Kiran Bedi, Swami Agnivesh and Anna Hazare. It was no mere show of strength, the demands were practical: Pass the Lokpal Bill in the next session of parliament. It creates a powerful anti-corruption body called the Lokpal, which is efficient, transparent, and completely independent. To depend on the government to move against corruption is to ask the thieves to close the door after they have finished looting.
The sheer mind-numbing figures of the Commonwealth Games (CWG) scam have proved to be the tipping point. People across India are disgusted with the sheer scale of corruption. On Sunday, people stood up to say enough is enough – in Goa, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Kolkata and elsewhere. For the first time in years, a non-political rally in Goa drew a huge crowd.
Politicians should take note. We are a sending out a clear message that we are sick of the mess you have created; of the way you have looted us; of the way you are raping the state. Especially note; the gathering unanimously resolved that illegal mining be immediately stopped, and those behind it be sent to jail.
I have a personal list of people I would like to see in jail. Heading it are those responsible for reducing the process of creating a Regional Plan into a farce; for shoving in last-minute changes and additions, and for reducing the plan to a tool for various lobbies. This is corruption of the worst order, because those responsible have corrupted the clear will of the people of the state.
Coming a close second are those responsible for illegal mining – the officials who turn a blind eye, the greedy mine owners who would happily swallow the state if they could, and the politicians who support them.
A special cell is reserved for those mine owners who rape the state and then pose as saviours by funding art-and-culture initiatives. I don’t know whom they imagine they are fooling.
An entire block is reserved for corrupt government servants. It’s thanks to them that children fall sick after midday meals, that over 40 per cent of assistance for the poor vanishes, that only 5 paise in every rupee of government schemes actually reaches the people it is meant for.
That’s the problem. If you put all of them in jail, you would run out of space. Corruption is so deep rooted, so part of the system, that to remove it means hacking out huge chunks of that system itself. But if that’s what it takes, so be it. India cannot continue the way it is going right now. The march clearly showed that the imperative for change is upon us. The numbers can no longer be ignored.
Someone once said: “The problem is not just that the politicians and rulers are corrupt; the problem is that the people are corrupt.” You see that truth every day. Somebody has an illegal extension in their house, so they say nothing when the Panchayat overrules the Gram Sabha. Someone needs an illegal water connection, so they keep quiet when their neighbour puts up an illegal fence. Trading favours and silent connivance among ordinary folk is the foundation on which the grand scaffolding of corruption stands.
There is one place to start the fight against corruption – at home. Get that permission, even if it takes three months longer than if you just went and buttered the Sarpanch. Refuse to give that bribe, even if it means that your papers will be delayed. Yes, it means inconvenience, extra effort and wasted man hours. But it also means that you are that rare person who personally stands by the truth. Go for that rally for sure, but to really fight corruption, begin right here at home.
