Article 371 (1) of the Constitution must be immediately amended to lessen if not eradicate Goa’s land and mining scams which are interlinked. For the black money generated in the mining scams is used in cheating the comunidade land owners.
The Supreme Court cancelled 88 mining leases, renewed by the then Goa government through dubious means. Land, mining and law and order come under List II or the state list of the Constitution which is why two of Goa’s chief ministers have been charge-sheeted for accepting bribes running into crores. They make the laws which they break with impunity.
Goa’s crime branch has described one of these chief ministers in 2015 as a “habitual offender involved in corruption cases.” The late Manohar Parrikar declared that the retired Supreme Court judge M.B. Shah got his arithmetic wrong when his report declared that losses worth Rs 35,000 crore had been caused to the Goa exchequer for renewal of 88 of mining leases. Parrikar said the losses were only Rs 3500 crore.
These scams should be handed over to the CBI to investigate. They will take over the files of the SIT. But nothing may emerge as the same political party rules in Delhi and Goa.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested an actor-cum-businessman from Mumbai who bought Vijay Mallya’s posh Calangute bungalow for over Rs 73 crore. His dubious transactions with a big realtor, where he is probably a sleeping partner and diversion of Rs 400 crore from a private bank, is symptomatic of what ails Goa.
There is no doubt that Goa’s ministers comprise part of the land mafia but they operate through such actors-cum-realtors who can hire top-notch senior lawyers from Delhi to punch holes in the charge-sheets filed by the ED and the SIT.
Nearly 128 such land-grabbing cases are being probed by the SIT who know that some top officials in their own departments are implicated in these scams.
The land prices in Salvador do Mundo and Socorro have gone through the roof, which was why a certain minister got his former confidante-turned-foe arrested for grabbing Comunidade land. This builder-cum-minister runs a trust to provide jobs for jobless youth and allegedly used his clout with the former DGP to get his rival arrested. This local land-shark who was earlier a supporter of the minister was arrested only after he fell out with the minister.
A former sarpanch from Salvador do Mundo who is himself a builder, resigned to thwart a no-confidence motion against him by his own panchayat ward members who accused him of not taking them into confidence while turning a blind eye to the construction activity going on by migrants in the private forest zone of this village. Whether the special status granted to Goa will result in frustrating these land sharks remains to be seen.
The brutal burning to death of Vilas Mether in Salvador do Mundo is a case in point. He dared to file RTI applications in the village panchayat of Salvador do Mundo seeking information about a builder with criminal links. The man who planned the murder was arrested for illegal sale of narcotics and is close to a minister.
This was why late Matanhy Saldanha was a votary for a special status for Goa simply because the union territory, as it then was, had no representation in the Constituent assembly while Goa was under the Portuguese. This special status envisaged that the Goa government should be given certain powers by the Central government to curtail sale of private land to non-Goans.
This special status has now been reduced to a pipe dream even after activists handed over a memorandum to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Panjim. The lands belonging to the comunidades of Arvalem, Serula and Sancoale have been sold.
The Opposition has alleged that a huge project of 1800 flats will come up after 500 hectares of land belonging to the comunidade of Sancolae was sold to Zuari Agro Chemicals. “This is a huge scam of Rs 50,000 crore” alleged an opposition MLA who was accused of trying to split the Congress party.
In an earlier case of the Serula comunidade land scam, four panchayat secretaries and seven office bearers of the comunidade were among the 26 charge-sheeted. Whether they will be convicted or not remains to be seen. Panchayat secretaries are government employees who are subject to disciplinary rules of the government. They must ensure that resolutions are passed by the elected panchayat representatives before any land is sold.
In another 2016 case from Chandor, the investigating officer of the Maina Curtorim police station refused to register an FIR when a 96-year-old lady was cheated into signing a bogus sale deed declaring she was the only daughter of her dead parents. Even after his closure report was rejected by the magistrate, the Maina-Curtorim police have not investigated the case properly despite knowing the sub-registrar who registered the bogus sale deed was notoriously corrupt.
Land scams, mining and coal will clean bowl the Goan economy into the doldrums unless Goa gets a special status to preserve itself from ruin.
(Olav Albuquerque holds a PhD in law and is a senior journalist-cum-advocate of the Bombay High Court)
