Much has already been said about St Inez creek, the narrow tidal waterway running through Panjim, which burst its banks a few weeks ago and flooded the Camara Bhat and Peterbhat areas of Taleigao. People nearby had to spend a night in water, which rose above human height in some houses. They were provided makeshift shelter the next day in a school building, but only after hours of phoning officials and local politicians for help. It took five days for the water to subside, leaving houses in a filthy mess and completely ruining their contents — from foodstocks and clothes, to fridges and TVs. Government officials came and made a list of the losses, promising compensation which is yet to arrive – an unsurprisingly bad situation in which luckily no life was lost.
Who does not know of the woes of St Inez creek? Years of news reports, government promises, expert info, citizens’ initiatives, and academic studies have informed everyone of its increasing pollution, shrinking size, and declining speed. These are all the result of constructions along its banks, the dumping of solid wastes and untreated sewage, and the spread of surface overgrowth, coupled with neglect by the local administration which, according to locals, has not cleaned it in years. But for many news reports, the deluge was almost deserved; these ‘slums’, as they call the creek-side houses, should never have been there in the first place.
Now the Corporation of Panjim (CCP) is taking action, we hear. The Union Urban Development Ministry has released Rs 19.5 crore for the creek, which the CCP intends to spend on de-silting, beautification, redevelopment, the construction of a pavement and a 5-metre-wide buffer zone on either side of the creek (OHeraldo, 4 Sept 2014). This is good news for many ‘Ponjekars’, including the nostalgic ones who like to hark to the good old days of fishing in the creek, the well-travelled ones who post pictures of Dutch canals and wonder why St Inez can’t be as pretty, not to mention the environmentalists and nature-lovers losing sleep over bio-diversity loss, the creek’s resident crocodile notwithstanding. But, while certain aspects of the proposal are being hotly debated, like the necessity of concretized banks, everybody is unanimous on one issue: the slums alongside have to go.
But why only the slums? On the banks of the creek are also commercial establishments, a hospital, a hotel, an ill-equipped sewage treatment plant, and many bungalows and apartment buildings, most tightly hemming the creek in with concrete walls right on the water’s edge. Many of these are reported to be dumping garbage into the creek. Is the administration going to remove them as well? Or, at least push them all back by 5 metres?
And let’s be real: it is not just the people on its banks who have messed up the creek. The problem is wider, even beyond the Ponjekars who live away from the creek but stop on its bridges to throw their plastic bags of garbage in. The real problem is our collective residence, the fact that all of us have crammed ourselves into Panjim and the surrounding khazans in our concrete buildings, surrounded by concrete compounds, connected by ever-widening tarred roads, and churning out hills of non-biodegradable waste, all of which has destroyed the absorbing capacity of this formal tidal wetland and put tremendous pressure on the few water bodies that remain. The St Inez creek is a natural waterway that formed the west edge of the original city, and remains one of Panjim’s main storm water drains. All around it former fields, ponds, and marshes in which buffaloes used to loll just a decade or two ago, are being filled in for real estate profit, and we don’t have to look far to see the havoc that this profit-driven approach can wreak: Bombay’s deluge of July 2005, when more than a thousand people died. Rainwater flows from today’s impervious surfaces into the few remaining creeks and lakes, and when you have heavy showers coinciding with high tides, they can’t take it.
So are we all ready to leave, our bull-dozed homes behind us, for the benefit of St Inez creek? If the answer is ‘Of course not!’ then let’s try to extend the same disbelief when this suggestion is made about others who just happen to be unable to own or rent prime real estate.
The people living alongside the creek are not new arrivals; many have worked in and around Panjim for a couple of generations or even longer, like some households at St Inez, who explain that they are former mundkars of the Miramar area. When the bhatkars sold their lands to real estate developers, the mundkars were promised permanent homes elsewhere but given temporary ones here on the creek’s edge; this is where some still remain, in limbo. At Peterbhat in Taleigao, the residents have lived in this old and neglected coconut plantation, where falling coconuts and even trees pose a constant threat to life, for 30-40 years. They lived originally in coconut-thatched huts without electricity or water supply, and paid rent to the local bhatkar; only in the last 10-15 years has some basic infrastructure come up in the area, along with tin roofs over the houses. But the bhat has now been sold to developers, and the residents are being pressurized to leave.
The point is that successive governments have failed miserably in their responsibility to provide basic housing to citizens who cannot afford the market prices of Goa’s real estate. And even now, it is these people who are the easy targets. If evictions along the banks of the creek are really necessary, they should be done only after a consultative rehabilitation programme. And if not, measures have to be taken for better houses and infrastructure in these areas. Otherwise it will be just one more example of the poor paying the price for bad planning, misadministration, and land-profiteering.
(Amita Kanekar is an architectural
historian and novelist.)
