It is heartening to see the Village Groups of Goa raising its voice against the anti-people stand of the government in pushing through a piecemeal notification of the Regional Plan in 174 panchayats, defying all logic, ostensibly to get the planning process moving. In reality the process of giving Goa a Regional Plan for the people, of the people and by the people has been completely compromised.
The VGG has correctly demanded the return of the plan to every village panchayat (there are 190 of them with the inclusion of Harvalem) for verification by the Village Level Committees and the Gram Sabhas, to approve the inclusions made by the State Level Committee. The VGG has also very aptly challenged that contention of the government that 174 of the 190 panchayats had accepted the Regional Plan because these panchayats had raised no objections to the notified plan. This contention of the government is completely unfounded – and actually absurd. There is no evidence on record that these panchayats have accepted the Regional Plan. It’s a logic defying contention.
The biggest casualty in the process of participative planning has been participative planning itself. It is important to know that the original TCP Act of 1974 preceded massive changes in favour of local self governance. The 74th amendment brought in its wake power to local self governments in a manner hitherto not witnessed. It was riding on these powers, that the road map for Regional Planning was drawn. When the notified Regional Plan of 2021 was made public, the real stakeholders, people in the villages, realized that crucial village specific suggestions made by their village level committees; were mostly ignored or bypassed. This was when the movement against the notified RP arose. A couple of prominent members of the task force set up for the plan, expressed very strong reservations about the manner in which the plan was finalised, with major variations from the draft plan which was much more of a people centric plan than the notified plan was .
The biggest casualty of the notified Regional Plan was that it was huge deviation from the settled principle of participative planning. And the plan was kept in “abeyance” in order to restore that plan back on the path of participative planning by sending it to the Village Level Committees for scrutiny. This was done in 2012 by the very same BJP government. After waiting for three long years, with constant promises of doing what it was supposed to do way back on 2012, the same BJP government now states that 174 panchayats have accepted the very plan the whole of Goa rejected. And in an attempt to restart the planning process, it plans to give life to a plan in abeyance and which was promised to be de-notified.
The least that this BJP government needs to do is to be honest to its own self. The existing plan has to be de-notified because Village Level Committees cannot give suggestions and seek changes to a notified plan. The plan, as promised by former chief minister Manohar Parrikar, has to be sent to every village for Village Level Committees to deliberate and vote. This is all the more important because the Town and Country Planning Department has randomly rejected many suggestions that have come to it.
There is another issue raised by the Village Level Groups which needs a serious look – including the Outline Development Plan (ODP) areas in the Regional Plan. Currently the urban and semi urban areas, including villages, are out of the purview of the Regional Plan, and controlled by the Planning and Development Authorities. Many mega construction projects are passed through this route making a mockery of participative planning. Many suspect that the decision to bring the villages of Calangute and Candolim under the North Goa Planning and Development Authority, outside the purview of the Regional Plan, is solely to allow the massive concretization of these villages through a spate of construction. A people approved Regional Plan would have put paid to this. Therefore, the Regional Plan should be made applicable to all areas in Goa and not just the village panchayat areas.
Herald supports any people’s movement that rises now and will back to sustain it, in order to force the government to do what it has promised, and that too in the temple of democracy – the legislative assembly. If it does not, Goa is capable of overturning political regimes which become anti-people.
