It’s another day in paradise, Dear Goans. It took Health Department the brain stroke of not an MLA of a migrant’s city Vasco but that of capitalism friendly Power Minister to have the Head of Goa Medical College’s Neurology Department to be sent to the US for training in ‘stroke management’. Elsewhere in Chaudi (Cancona) the wing wall of the newly constructed national highway overbridge at Char Rasta came crashing down as Tribal Welfare and Art & Culture Minister Govind Gaude announces setting up of Ravindra Bhavan at remote Pernem and Sanguem and a Tribal Museum at Marcel. So while you were away from Goa on your annual holiday and decided not to step out, first due to summer heat and then due to monsoons, your apology of a government – the disputable Cabinet Advisory Committee (CAC) – has been running Goa like a headless chicken. Its priorities reminiscent of Marie Antoinette’s infamous words, “If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake”.
About 18 years ago when Manohar Parrikar first led BJP to form the government, the magic word was “Deolopement”. No there isn’t anything wrong with the word, that is how they pronounced development then. The “v” in the word, which might have stood for the virtues of development, went missing. Goans were promised Singapore. Mammoth infrastructure that would spoil Goa’s landscape forever, bridges to bring in real estate jungles to islands of peace joined only by periodic ferries – the “Deolopement” of Goa was actually marring the face of this pristine land forever. And they did succeed. Eighteen years later the outlandish rape and ravage of Goa have gone beyond its lands, its waters, its air and now into its economy.
Early this year, Finance Secretary Daulat Hawaldar had drawn the attention of all government departments to the surge of government expenditure in the fourth quarter of the financial year. His memorandum recommended that “except under the flagship schemes of the government or centrally sponsored schemes”, the expenditure may be reduced by 40 per cent till the end of the current financial year. The government had realised “that the departments have the tendency of indulging in bulk purchases at the fag-end of the financial year in order to incur an expenditure of unspent budgetary provisions allotted for the given financial year (and) most of the time these provisions exceed the requirements, leading to wasteful expenditure by the departments”. Finance Department had also limited expenditure to exceed only between 7 to 11 per cent of the budget estimates. But the way in which the CAC-led government has been spending on these novelties, it could be anybody’s guess how public money is being spent brazenly on unplanned and kneejerk expenditure throwing the Finance Secretary’s biding to the winds. So if you thought Goa had recorded over 7 rapes ever since its Home Minister went on sick leave, now be prepared to add the fact that its mindless expenditure too is climbing up in the absence of its Finance Minister.
While the clearance of over 60 projects with a cumulative cost of over Rs 400 crore by an Advisory Committee of the Cabinet (not an Executive Committee) shows us a government which is hegemonic, what is driving the people of Goa restless is that it has no control either over the MLAs that it elects or the government that runs the State. If Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar would bluntly force his decisions down the Goan electorate’s throat, the CAC is doing it on the sly. With half of the ruling dispensation in attendance of the Power Minister in Mumbai, some holidaying abroad and others enjoying the sussegad passiveness of the Goan electorate, the State is heading from an administrative hellhole to a debt trap run by a coterie of bureaucrats quite detached from Goa and Goans.
