While there was a fire burning in the Margao market, some homes in Panjim were still struggling to come to terms with last weeks’ deluge, where streets and homes were inundated. In a cruel twist of irony, the homes were flooded but the taps were dry as yet another breakdown cut off water supply to the capital. In Ponda the face off between market shopkeepers and traders over the payment of sopo tax has become an issue of politics and ego. In Vasco, the stench of rotten vegetables in the market gets worse. And coming back to Margao, the Sonsoddo waste treatment plant project hangs fire with the MMC unable to get additional land and the door to door waste collection plan stuck in a quagmire of multiple hiccups, including the lack of funds to buy bins.
Every town in Goa, has become a pathetic icon of urban decay starting with its civic bodies which are bigger cess pits of inefficiency, apathy and corruption and bad politics than any state government can ever be. No councillor in Goa is ever short of money, but every council surely is.
The basic template of the way towns are governed in Goa is a parody of governance. Every town has three parallel lines of command and governance each working at cross purposes with each other. Firstly, there are the two planning and development authorities that ostensibly play the role the Town and Country Planning Department plays in the panchayat areas. Its role is to make development plans, earmark areas of construction and issue construction licenses. Ideally, this body has to work in sync with the municipal council which alone should be the creator and custodian of the master plan of the city and the point of coordination for all centrally funded projects. None of this happens. The “master plan” for Goa’s towns is an esoteric concept which is spoken of from time to time but never moves from discussion to paper to practice, mostly limited to the first stage, rarely moving to the second but never really reaching the third.
The second line of command are the municipal bodies that are steeped in corruption and power play. From the very day that a chairperson is elected, the countdown begins to topple him or her, with two to three new chairpersons doing the rounds each year. And as always if the chairperson is not from the ruling party, it becomes an all out battle of cutting him or her to size and stifling the council of funds and projects. It often gets very personal. While the frustration of the Panjim mayor in being completely cornered by the chief minister through the CCP Commissioner Sanjith Rodrigues, who treats the mayor as a lowly clerk, is well documented, a similar power play is visible in most councils, including the ones that are not in the limelight. For instance the Sanquelim Municipal Council chief Dharmesh Saglani, also the owner of the Cuba brand of luxury shacks, found to his chagrin that the Tourism Department while earmarking shacks had allotted a plethora of shacks in front of Saglani’s permanent Cuba shack in Palolem, to effectively block the entrance to his shack. When he went to the tourism minister, he was told “some decisions are taken by the party”. He reportedly then met his bitter local rival, Sanquelim MLA Pramod Sawant who reportedly told him to resign as chairperson of the Sanquelim Municipal Council to pave the way for the removal of shacks from the front of his beach property.
The third and the most powerful line of command is obviously the government which controls all, when the most effective way to govern would have been the hands off approach allowing councils to work. Government control is most visible in Panjim where the CCP has been superseded by the GSIDC which is implementing the Panjim master plan which is not even in the possession of the CCP. This is the most blatant form of civic dictatorship where the fall guys are the people of Panjim. Civic administration has been reduced to a puppet show where the mayor and the commissioner are in a open public face off.
The tested manner in which civic administration works the world over is through independence and autonomy allowing each urban body to work as a mini government. It is important too that a trained cadre of municipal officers is created in a dedicated academy with exposure to the way civic governments work. The state government’s role should be limited to matters of policy making. It is only then that accountability becomes direct and visible. And the final transformation will be when councils are run like private enterprises with just one mayor and executive ward officers.
At the end of the day, it matters little to people if bridges are built, or industrial estates come up, if their homes are flooded, there’s no water in their taps, the garbage is not collected and the roads look bombed.
