With each day, Chief Minister Parsekar is coming closer to the next election at a speed which will see hours constricted to minutes and seconds. Notwithstanding the results of the Panjim by elections, Mr Parsekar cannot take further time to “study issues”, if he wants to win 2017. There is no time to study. If the party organisation’s mandate is to push the development agenda forward, then the BJP has to move out of the mode of keeping issues in the backburner and then wish that the fire would burn out.
The Parsekar government cannot hope to move ahead, with the baggage of the Parrikar government acting like handbrakes, unless it seeks to address broad burning issues affecting the state as a whole. While this will not address the more genuine bread and butter issues, the perception battle will be won thus giving it the platform to improve infrastructure and create jobs. The de-notifying of the Regional Plan of 2021 and introducing a fresh one, has become Goa’s ‘Kashmir issue’. Nothing can move forward unless the wind which gave wing to the anti- Congress wave in 2012, the scrapping of the flawed Regional Plan was sorted.
The Regional Plan therefore is a non-negotiable issue that has to be sorted, before anything else is brought to the table.
The irony is that there are vast sections of Goa’s population who do not quite understand what the overall issue is all about, but almost all of them understand that lives in their villages and their future will be impacted if they do not get the reins of development in their hands.
This government will have to deliver on this front now. Half baked comments from the Deputy Chief Minister (based on incorrect briefing by the TCP department) that the village plans of over 170 villages, kept in suspension for over two years, can be revived because panchayats had not objected, have to stop. Herald has spoken about the fallacy of this argument time and again. But it is re-emphasising this because there appears to be no clear road map on this contentious issue as permissions for construction continue to be given, even as the plan is kept in abeyance.
There was a serious communication gap on this issue when Manohar Parrikar was in power. That gap has hardly narrowed with Parsekar in power. Firstly, there needs to be a visible communication channel between government and stake holders, mainly NGO’s who were included and embraced by the earlier Digambar Kamat government which sat on the same table- even if it was to argue and disagree. On the NGO side, there is no harm in going back to the same set- the Goa Bachao Abhiyan and the Village Groups of Goa and begin a two week workshop where the issues of each village plan can be discussed threadbare, rather than send the plans to the villages and wait for their revert. At the end of the three day period, the government will have an updated inventory of each village in the taluka and its plans and the corrections needed. Following which, all suggestions of the villages should be uploaded on a specially created micro site on the TC website. After this a new task force should be created, including members of the two public stakeholder NGO’s, to draw up a final plan for the villages. Once these are uploaded, there should be a column explaining why each specific suggestion was not taken.
Remember even a less than agreeable plan will work if it is a fully transparent plan. Such as plan will have the same goalposts for all.
This can be done. Mr Parsekar hasn’t quite realised that if he sorts this ‘Kashmir issue’ out, everything else including investment, jobs and tourism and waste management will fall in place because each of them depend on a well defined land use road map. Every new development like new institutes of higher learning, a sports city, stadiums and so on can be planned around this.
All that remains is the simplest understanding that this needs to be done.
