-I am doubting my Chief Town Planner’s involvement in the illegal developments’
-The time has come when we have to take some stringent measures and strong action against the officers to ensure that people’s faith and confidence in our department is restored
-Now I am little bit confused whether our department itself is moving slow on it because officials themselves are involved in illegalities
-I just cannot be quiet on this. I cannot allow the department I am handling to promote illegalities
These are four comments direct quotes of the Town and Country Planning Minister Vijai Sardesai during a formal conversation about his misgivings about the functioning of his own department, which he intends to clean up from within. On the face of it, this is an extremely serious indictment of his own department and an admission that the minister suspects that veterans of the department are indulging in corruption and “colluding with illegal development”.
These statements, while realising that they need to be taken with extreme seriousness, are riddled with ironies. It is undeniable, if the Minister’s doubts are indeed rooted in reality, that corruption could even be the foundation on which the TCP has functioned and secondly, that this corruption has been tolerated for years, including – as widely reported, speculated and alleged, when Babush Monseratte was the Town and Country planning minister. It was Manohar Parrikar himself, as Chief Minister earlier, who had once said that if he suspended or sacked more people from the TCP department for corruption, there would be no department.
Sardesai’s outburst against his department, in a sense is justified. But a greater reality is that the TCP department has been under scrutiny and largely believed to be a fountain of corruption and a stumbling block against planned people’s participation in grassroot development. The massive agitation to scrap the Regional Plan of 2011, which was chiselled by Babush Monseratte, as its architect, was based on the rampant conversions of fragile land including hills, slopes and no development zones.
It is the debris of that destruction, which took place on TCP’s maps before the destruction reached the ground, which is taking years to clean up and it is now , when a process to clean up the past and start afresh, is attempted, the projects or “development” promised then are becoming realities and coming to haunt the department now.
Therefore the immediate trigger for Vijai Sardesai to demand the ouster of Chief Town Planner ST Putturaju may be because the CTP paved the way for a state highway to be built through the heritage village of Chandor, when the Minister himself is against it (See our reports on Pages 1 & 2 of this edition). But this at best is only a trigger. At the same time, if the minister seeks a total cleaning up operation – and if current political trends hold and he gets what he wants- will that alone be a foolproof cushion against further irregularities and illegal conversions and development?
We will not know till we see this getting played out. Fair enough. But the thin line between corruption and honesty can be crossed to the side of honesty only if there is honesty of purpose. And this will be displayed only through tangible decisions which seek to keep more areas of Goa under the ward and watch of grass-root planning. Goa’s identity lies in its villages and protecting that identity alone will reveal an honesty of purpose.
Cleaning up the mythological Augean stables of corruption, as it were, should be supported. But the bigger challenge is to keep those stables clean after the rot has been cleansed. This is when honesty of purpose will be tested.
