From an experiment in smart cities that is still in the early stages, we are now moving to smart villages, and that would be welcome step, as Goa really needs this if it is to stay relevant to the times. The best thing about this smart village concept, as elucidated by the Panchayat Minister, is that it is for holistic rural development where the basic necessities required in the village would be preserved and improved upon.
These necessities would include beautification of the market places and building new bazaars, improving open spaces by promoting gardens and playgrounds, garbage management, maintaining and improving water bodies – in short all that would make the quality of life better, as the minister aims to make the village ‘look like a village’ and ‘maintain the character of Goa and the village’. These are goals that nobody should have a quarrel with, but that is one big challenge that the minister and the government is taking on. But it really isn’t smart if there will still be people in the villages defecating in the open. Has this aspect been left out? Considering that Goa is the slowest State in the race to be open defecation free, the minister and the government should include this in any smart village plan.
There is, however, one aspect of our rural areas that has to be taken into consideration when planning the smart villages. Take a look at some of our ‘villages’ – the so-called rural areas – and it is easily questionable whether some of these have the distinctive character of a village of a town. The Porvorim area for instance, that is made up of various village panchayats and has no rural characteristics whatsoever, yet the people living there and running businesses in the area enjoy the tax benefits of rural populations and enterprises.
Go further to the coastal areas and look at Calangute, Colva and some of the other beachside areas. Or to the villages surrounding Panjim such as Taleigao, all these have lost the character of a village but the people have opposed any move to convert them into municipal areas. Some of these even come under the Planning and Development Areas, yet resolutely cling to their rural status. When the Corporation of the City of Panaji was formed in 2002, it had been envisaged to include Taleigao and areas across the River Mandovi including Penha de Franca and Porvorim, but this was discarded when there was opposition from the people. Panjim was elevated from a municipal council to a municipal corporation, but its jurisdiction remained unchanged.
The rising number of census towns makes it obvious that the villages of Goa no longer resemble a village, which is what the smart village concept looks to remedy. To succeed at that it will first have to identify the villages where there still exists the possibility of maintaining the rural character.
Many of Goa’s villages today lack the characteristics of rural areas. The number of census towns in Goa has been increasing. The 2001 census had listed 38 towns in the State, and in 2011 there were 56 villages that had been listed as census towns. In March last year, the then Urban Development Minister Francis D’Souza had said that all these were eligible to be upgraded to municipalities, but had left it to the village panchayats to take a decision and then approach the government. None have, and they perhaps will not. It is, however, for the government to take a decision on this. It cannot be left to the individual panchayats, who are often even unable to present proper development plans and annual budgets, with some merely copying the budget heads of the previous year and passing it at the next. Give us smart villages, and let those that no longer have rural characteristics develop as towns, rather than haphazardly as is happening currently.
