Like hundreds of dutiful citizens we lined up in an endless queue for the high security registration plates (HSRP) at the Panjim RTO. We were rather fortunate. In mid-October the crowds hadn’t yet inflated to the nightmare proportions that followed days later. Standing behind was a man with a scooter registration done in Mapusa. He preferred Panjim, because “the Mapusa RTO is just god-awful”, he said. Having experienced that nightmare, I more than sympathized.
After a two-hour wait before a single desk (no senior citizens’ line, no special concession to women and a grindingly slow system) we emerged triumphant. A government-given token on payment of Rs 332 took us days later to utter chaos (a single desk again, with a crush of men around it) in a cow-dung spattered shed in Porvorim. This, the transport department had decided, was good enough to herd vehicle owners to get the plates fitted.
The RTO and Real Mazon India Ltd (given the HSRP contract in October 2018) had a whole year to get their act together. Yet no one will be held accountable for the shoddy delivery of service and the shoddier treatment of the public. Not transport minister Mauvin Godinho for sure, who in a befuddled twist of logic said there was no need for panic. “No one will be fined for not installing the number plate immediately.”
The HSRP mess—a minor issue really in the larger context of administration—gives us a sense of the fumbling of this government, even as its loud mouths audaciously peddle a false narrative. On the day we were crowded into the dung spattered shed, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant was playing host to dozens of high profile talking heads and “would-be” investors at the Vibrant Goa Summit.
The glitzy affair (the Adil Shah palace, 8 km away from the venue, had been lit up for the event in these times of the global warming crisis) promoted by a private entity, Vibrant Goa Foundation, received a grant of Rs 2 crore from the cash-strapped government for the show. No questions have been asked about how the money’s been spent. “So what if the government chose to give us the grant, we’re helping promote the state,” said Nitin Kunkolinekar (a director at Synegra EMS Ltd) who heads the new “foundation” with a website that reads more like an extension of Friends of BJP.
Mauvin, on the other hand, was lamenting the manpower shortage in the RTOs which he said exacerbated the HSRP fiasco. No recruitments have taken place; the department has been hit by a severe staff shortage, he said. The government’s crippling cash crunch (the state’s borrowings are set to touch Rs 22,500 crore by some estimates) and Sawant’s bid to control placements, has thrown the process off gear.
If you go with the fiction, the state’s economy’s on a robust clip: we’re loaded enough to host and entertain would-be investors that may never invest. The chief minister’s record in running the Investment Promotion Board aground gives us a heads up on what to expect on that score.
If you go with the facts, the government’s too broke to fill up crucial vacancies in public services departments like the RTOs.
More fiction was spun by the headline grabber Michael Lobo who recently went on a shopping spree scouring the globe for more over-the-top garbage plants. This time it was the Scandinavian countries. Lobo is minister for ports. But he chose to take off abroad even as the naphtha loaded ship sits precariously on rocks off Marivel village at Dona Paula. He later took a media group on a boat ride to “inspect” the MV Nu-Shi Nalini so he could scoff at the plausible fears of a naphta leak. The government, he said, was keeping a close eye on it. On the very day, the Mormugao Port Trust told the High Court the ship’s bottom was in “imminent danger” of cracking and leaking out “2,000 tonnes of naphta together with diesel and heavy oil”.
Sawant’s biggest critics, most of them Parrikar admirers, see him as clueless. There’s nothing clueless however, about a chief minister who places his personal interests above the people’s like when he skedaddled across the border to “campaign” for his party in the Maharashtra election, but ended up instead doing some real estate prospecting for his personal business.
The problem with this government is not just its weak and self-serving leadership, but the complacency of arrogance it fosters in the rest. Even after all the HSRP chaos, I’d be surprised if Mauvin deigned stir out of his air-conditioned zone to visit any of the centres. A satellite of individual power centres surrounds Sawant. Some like Babu Ajgaonkar chart their own ministerial course, taking off abroad on official tours with family in tow; allowing his son to run a floating restaurant off Panjim for months with no licences; and more recently, appointing his own brother on a government sports panel. One doesn’t dare open the pandora’s box of Babu Kavlekar’s record for what might tumble out.
The only bright spot in the expanding gulf between those who govern and those being governed is the return of Sanjith Rodrigues as commissioner of CCP. Going by the past, how much Sanjith will be allowed to do in Panjim and how long he lasts will depend on how he negotiates the tricky terrain in delivering on what the public expects and assuaging political interests.
(Devika Sequeira is a senior journalist)
