The much-awaited Exposition of the Sacred Relics of St Francis Xavier is here. For the past few weeks the village of Old Goa has been getting a cleanup and is now ready, or almost, to welcome its guests. Almost, because there are a few works still remaining to be done, yet given the pace at which projects have been taken to completion in Goa, there should be no fears of them remaining undone. If Goa could get ready for IFFI 2004 and for Lusofonia Games 2014 at short notice, there is no reason to believe that it can’t meet the Exposition deadline.
What makes the Exposition distinctively different from other events, is that it is the best example of how the Church and the State can successfully work together in Goa. On Thursday, two days before the Exposition could get off to a start, Archbishop Filipe Neri Ferrao visited Old Goa and after inspecting the preparations expressed his happiness at how they were progressing. He was accompanied by State officials and some religious. A few days earlier Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar had undertaken the same inspection and had promised that all will be ready in time for Saturday’s inaugural mass.
Preparations for the Exposition begin well in advance, for the Church over a year before the actual date. This time the Church made its announcement of the Exposition in October last year, a full 13 months before the event, and immediately thereafter set up a committee comprising clerics, religious and lay persons. The State too constituted an Exposition Commission to undertake logistic preparations and ensure security of the event. Though the State Exposition Committee was constituted around July this year, months before that the finances required for the works had already been taken into account and a budgetary allocation made in March.
For the State, prepping up for the exposition is no small task, burdened as it is with the knowledge that if anything goes wrong it will have charges of communalism leveled at it. Here, the Archbishop’s statement to the State and Church officials after the visit underlines how important it is for both to work in tandem. “When things go right, everybody wants to take credit. Similarly, when things go wrong let us all take the responsibility for the same,” the Archbishop said. It probably reduced the weight on the shoulders of the State officials tasked with ensuring the Exposition’s smooth conduct.
And that, the smooth conduct of the Exposition, is not an easy task. There are on an average one lakh pilgrims expected to be in Old Goa daily. On the surface it may appear that it is just traffic control and security that the State has to manage, but there are various other areas that require State attention. While many pilgrims will come in their own vehicles and leave immediately after participating in a mass and venerating the relics, many others will spend more time in Old Goa, hours and days, and it is for these that lodging arrangements have to be made. Temporary pilgrim shelters with toilet blocks have been constructed, and more importantly arrangements to feed these pilgrims have been made. With so many people in such a small area there will be a lot of garbage generated and this too has to be cleared so that hygiene is maintained at all times. Simultaneously plans for emergency needs have to be in place and the fire and emergency services have to be stationed around the World Heritage Complex to meet these needs.
There are also new needs, including one that the Archbishop pointed out – network connectivity for cell phones. With so many people in one area and most using cell phones, it is likely that the airwaves will get jammed. In an era of instant photographic evidence there will be thousands of people uploading photographs on social media sites or just sending them across to relatives and friends at home. That too is being taken care of.
Nothing has been overlooked and all is in place. Old Goa is ready to welcome its pilgrims. And it’s been done in a flawless demonstration of how the Church and State can together craft a success story, actually an interesting theme for a management student’s project.
