Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar’s latest round of statements on the Mopa airport border on the preposterous. But it will be worth a detailed study to figure whether these are out of sheer ignorance or brazenness. The suspicion is that it is clearly the latter.
The chief minister has in a nutshell told the State, the anti-MOPA agitationists and the Union Ministry of Environment. Forests and Climate change what we have headlines in our page one story, of this edition, “Mopa at any cost: environment be damned”
While this may be a rock star approach to industrialists waiting to invest in Goa, that the chief minister, ignores environmental concerns over projects detrimental to ecology, it flies in the face of checks and balances put in place by law. Chief Minister Parsekar is approaching the Mopa issue in the same way that he has approached the mining restart, which is to push the project by virtually ignoring environmental roadblocks and believe that big brother Prime Minister, helped by the Goan Defence Minister, will get these roadblocks removed.
The question is does the Goa chief minister, like his predecessor, think he is above the constitution. A project which was environmentally flawed from the very beginning when the Environmental Clearance was not taken before site selection as is mandatory, is now being “cleared” on the basis of verbal assurances of the chief minister. Imagine this. The chief minister declared that the first flight will take off from Mopa in 2019. So in the same breath why didn’t the CM, who is behaving like the Airport Traffic Controller and a Commander of a jet aircraft tell us which month, date and hour the take off will happen and for good ensure the name of the airline which will operate the first flight. Since this s the season of irrelevance, Mr Parsekar may as well go the whole hog.
The truth is that nothing matters to this man blinded by the desperation of inking his name on the so-called plaque of development, by taking anti- people, anti-Goa and anti-environment decisions. Let Goans not miss the audacity of the chief minister who says that queries raised by the expert panel from the ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate change, will not delay the Environment Clearance for the project.
Now who does the chief minister think he is? Is he the Union Environment Minister to make such a claim? Does he have it in his powers to pre-suppose that the EC will be given to him as a matter of right to promote investment in Goa and not on the basis of checking all environmental parameters which have been clearly flouted?
The government has no answers to why the baseline data is over three years old. It has given vague and baseless replies to queries on whether bird life will be affected and whether more forests will have to be destroyed to build the runway. The government is basing all its arguments on the basis of the Kasturiangan report that the Mopa area does not fall in the eco- sensitive zone. But it is silent on whether the most basic environment protocols have been followed.
It is also appalling that public money is being committed on studies and other expenses like hiring very expensive consultants without an
Environment Clearance. The MOEF will not give this in a hurry especially because it knows that the very watchful National Green Tribunal will strike down any EC given in haste without queries being satisfactorily dealt with by the state. Therefore for this reason too, the chief minister has no right to direct the spending of public resources for a project which does not have an Environmental Clearance.
Even if this government thinks that the potential airport developer who will be chosen through the Request for Proposal, will be taken in by the pace and urgency shown by the government; the people of Goa cannot be fooled. And like in Tiracol where the Golf Course project of Leading Hotels is being pushed through by anti-people fraudulent means, the Mopa misadventure will also be challenged in the right judicial forums.
We shall then see how the first plane takes off from Mopa in June 2019, by grounding environmental concerns.
