In a common man’s lingo, TDR reminds you of the golden days of illegal mining when the Govt was your cousin and everyone had a lease to give out to the mining companies. Paddy fields, fruit-bearing orchards and virgin forests, nothing was left as Mother Earth was dug up monstrously and she bled ore. The farmers’ bullocks made way for tippers and tankers as the rural economy in Goa ‘boomed’ only to leave behind thousands of bankrupt debtors as the illegal mining bubble burst. The amendment in the TCP Act for TDR promises to prey upon the same greed of Goans who are embittered by a failing economy, no jobs and no business security either. What mining did to poor, gullible Goans who gave away their cultivable ancestral lands as leases, TDR will make them exploit every nook and corner to transfer their Developmental Rights. As the Mahatma would say, “There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.” What TCP Department plans to unleash is a price tag for every lake, every paddy field, every Dando, every khazan – all in the name of conservation.
