There are no lifeguards on the beaches, there are not enough traffic policemen to control traffic on the roads, there are no or not enough toilets on the coastal belt, coupled with tourists who prefer to cook, eat and defecate – complete the entire cycling of food consumption to defecation – out in the open, and garbage is still dumped rampantly on the roads as simple village based waste clearance systems are not in place.
At the other end of the spectrum, the new year season has seen over a hundred parties across the coastal belts of Morjim, Mandrem, Anjuna, Vagator, with no valid Excise licenses, organised by foreigners, with foreign DJ’s playing with no valid business visas. These parties have been distributing posters and leaflets, announcing “show timings”, some of which start at 3 am and go on till 6 am. These timings violate all sounds laws in place.
This is the reality of Goa tourism. The basics are still not in place, which is diminishing the user or tourist experience by several notches. The profile of tourists who throng the beaches, has changed drastically. They are not those spending on hotel rooms or shacks or restaurants. They come to soak in Goa’s nature and in return, leave their muck and go back giving those they encounter a very bad experience, including women they leer at and molest.
The non-existent tourist policy has come to life an include and implement the following
1) The guest is God principle has to be amended to the “right guest is God”. A very strong tourist police cadre needs to be created as a strong mission where those trained to be police men must undergo a rigorous three year training at a Tourist Police Institute.
2) There needs to be specific demarcation of tourist zones. In these zones every vital department of the government, related to tourist welfare should function under and in synergy with the department of tourism which should expand and be re-introduced as a much more powerful and public centric Tourism Commission. The Commission should run like a well oiled and efficient corporate entity as an autonomous and completely free body empowered to take all decisions including of appointment. While there can be space for a senior IAS officer to be the Chairperson of the commission (and not an MLA), a professional CEO should run this. This will prevent incidents of like that of a good tourism Director Ameya Abhayankar being shunted out because he refused to agree to renewing a fraudulent beach cleaning contract, and was frequently “coming in the way” of the Tourism Minister running amuck with the department, with another, once upon a time good officer, as his hatchet man.
3) The TCP, Waste management, sewerage, transport and policing (the tourist police cadre) should report to the Commission. The Village plans for demarcated tourist zones should be redrawn and there should be a separate Regional Plan release only for these areas to ensure that while the needs of tourists are ensured, plans should be balanced to include holistic development and preservation of the environment, forests, greenery and living spaces in tourist areas.
4) All decisions with regard to excise and sound permissions, spaces for posters and hoardings (as opposed to defecation of homes and buildings with rampant illegal hoardings and signages) should be taken by the Commission and not become an issue of political gamesmanship between stakeholders and politicians.
5) All revenue earned from various fees in the tourists demarcated areas will be collected by the Tourism Commission and not individual departments. They will then be ploughed back to each department under a separate tourism head for specific use for developmental purposes in those toursm area. All employees of departments like Excise, TCP, waste management etc will be paid salaries from the Tourism Commission account. Admittedly this may create accounting hiccups but if the goal is genuine, this area will be problem free too. We just need committed minds to work on this.
For far too long, we have been expecting pro-active tourism governance starting with a water tight implementable policy. Successive governments have belied such expectations. The way forward has to be drastic, out of the box and game changing. Let Goa introduce a revolutionary model, where tourism is run and managed by hardcore professionals, leaving politicians out of this. They are the core of the problem and can never be expected to come up with solutions, which will affect their power brokering, their futures and their finances. But ironically you need law makers to bring in these changes. And if the current ones are incapable let the people of Goa lay down this template as a “must do” for those seeking our votes in 2017.
