With no disrespect meant to any elected representatives, a committee of MLA’s will have less domain knowledge of the issue that is immensely complex and needs inputs from people who were associated with the preparation of the first draft of the Regional Plan.
Instead of a house committee, a more result oriented move would be to form an experts committee, which would report to the assembly within a specific time frame. This committee should have the representation of the GBA and the Village groups, especially of the former and key members of the task force which had worked on the genesis of the first Regional Plan which had a bottom up participatory process. Not with standing all the pitfalls of the Regional Plan process, many villagers did a painstaking exercising of mapping village requirements by tooth combing their areas.
The presence of key figures like former Chief Planner, Government of India, India’s best known town planner Edgar Ribeiro, who resigned from the Regional Plan task force, after spearheading the draft plan, is imperative. Secondly, there should be a representative of the Archeological Survey of India which had written to the Chief Town Planner Goa not to allow any constructional activity or allotment of land around monuments in Old Goa covered under the World Heritage list till Heritage by Laws are framed. This letter was not only ignored but scoffed at as building permissions have been given. Thirdly this expert committee should have representatives of the GBA and the Village groups because both these groups have done an in-depth assessment of the plan and the village wise violations that have taken place in at least 50 % of the villages covered. This is too important a domain knowledge that can be kept away from the purview of the discussion.
This experts committee should be told that the starting point of their mandate to give Goa a new plan, has to be the Draft Regional Plan 2021. Only then will this effort have any seriousness. Professor Edgar Ribeiro had written to Chief Secretary Sanjay Srivastava on 3/12/2011 with the subject “Regional Plan 20201 needs an urgent revisit through de-notification” where he mentioned “RP 21 should be revisited with Draft RP 21 as a base. Such a revisit cannot be just in the form of palliatives but through a serious restructuring of the plan by de-notifying the notified plan and working upon it participatively”
The Chief Minister must show openness and transparency by engaging with these groups. The reason why he is reluctant to do this is because the attempt to allow the government to allow construction virtually in every area through a column in the plan, which is included under “Permissible Land Uses” called uses “Permitted on Special Grounds”. In most cases this column mentions ‘Any other allied uses which the government may decide in public interest’.
As we all know “public interest”, is the most brazenly incorrect terminology used for hard core private interest. And no committee of MLA’s can be expected to correct this unless the process involves people who work actually for public interest.
The government has played with the sentiments of the people and we suspect traded their future by delaying this plan for so long. It has been kept so long in the cold storage, that it cannot be cooked any further. It needs to be discarded and a fresh plan, which will have the same platform. The Draft Regional Plan which was the prior state of this plan, is a good enough start so that the wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented.
The government needs not just a new Regional Plan. It needs to display genuine honesty of purpose. The decision to constitute a house committee is a political one and not a public spirited one. The decision, at best, is a time buying tactic. We can see through it.
