What is one to make of the full-page front-page advertisement that M/s Leading Hotels Pvt. Ltd. has been publishing in Goa’s newspapers?
Titled ‘From Barren… to Beautiful’, the ad speaks of how Leading Hotels, an associate of the upmarket Hyatt brand, is going to display the ‘treasure of Tiracol’ to the world through its massive golf course and luxury resort project, while at the same time turning the existing village into a ‘model’ one, with steady power supply, 24-hours filtered and full treated drinking water, health care facilities, primary school, disaster centre, Wifi connectivity, you name it.
A golf course promising 24-hours drinking water? Surely this is a bad joke on a region that is already facing severe water shortages? According to news reports, many villages in Pernem taluka were supplied tap water for only a few minutes on many sweltering days of the last month of May, even as an increasing number of wells have turned saline. Add a golf course to this mix and what can one expect? The United Nations Environment Programme website declares golf courses as gigantic water-consumers, and quotes the British NGO Tourism Concern to the effect that an average golf course in a country like Thailand uses as much water as 60,000 villagers per year, along with 1500 kg of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. According to AsiaGolf (2002), golf courses require 3000 cubic metres of water per day, which is enough to meet the needs of 15,000 people (quoted in Caroline Palmer (2004), Golf Tourism and the Developing World: Exploring the Issues).
Nor is the rest of the ad any better. Can the dense cashew and coconut-growing orchards of Tiracol, set in a forest full of fruit-bearing and medicinal trees – such that one household in the village has made a living off making local herbal cures of all kinds for 2 generations now – be called barren? Forests where all kinds of wildlife are regularly sighted, including deer, leopards and 19,000 plant species, with turtle-nesting sites on the beaches, and great shoals of fat fish along the shore that attract anglers from as far away as Panjim and even Bombay every September – this is what Leading Hotels regards as barren!
What the ad forgets to advertise, moreover, is what the company is doing right now, after barging into Tiracol village on the night of 14 May, despite an order from the National Green Tribunal (NGT) staying tree-felling on the site. Protected by 50-odd bouncers, the intruders began to cut trees in an effort to lay a new road, stopping only when the villagers called in the police. When the company officials were questioned by journalists, they had a convenient answer – midnight was the auspicious time, as dictated by some Hindu priest, for some ritual on site. Hindu priests are of course capable of coming up with any bizarre reason for anything, but did this so-called auspicious time also require stealth and secrecy? And 50 musclemen who are martial arts experts? The true plan became clear less than a day later, when the work restarted, the bulldozers joined by other machines, the bouncers still in place. And this time the police refused to interfere, say the villagers, despite repeated pleas, with the result that the work continues till date. On top of this, the local river ferry has mysteriously stopped working for the past few days, breaking the villagers’ nearest connection to the rest of Goa, even as the hillside is being cut almost literally from under their feet.
Such is the ugly backdrop to the full-page advertisement. But, although seen by some as a sign that Goan press has sold out to Leading Hotels, it actually proves the opposite. Ideally, such corporate big shots would prefer their self-promotion to be done less obviously, in the form of apparently ‘objective’ journalistic pieces, not open advertisements. The very fact that Leading Hotels had to put up an ad in its own name is a sign that it has not been able to buy over Goa’s media, that it knows that the opposition is growing.
Goa has a long history of fighting golf courses and other brute forms of land take-over, though with varying success thanks to the political establishment. And that is the problem now as well. The government’s support to the project is long-standing, with the Chief Minister personally presiding over the company’s publicity events as Health Minister – when he should have instead been talking about the health risks associated with golf courses, including the carcinogenic nature of the chemicals commonly used to keep them green (Pleumarom (1992:3), in Caroline Palmer, 2004). Instead he declared that those opposing the project were ‘misled’, a statement echoed in the company’s ad which claims that villagers have been misled to believe that they are to be displaced. But if a project swallows all the agricultural and orchard land of a village that lives off farming, replacing it by chemical-laden turf, how are the villagers to survive? By watching the rich play golf?
What Tiracol is witnessing is a clash of Goa’s two tourisms, as described by Raghuraman Trichur (2013). One is the small scale villager-run tourism of shacks and similar tiny establishments, which has helped many mundkar families augment meagre incomes, while doing relatively minimal damage to the environment. The other is the up-market tourism of the big corporate groups, which takes over huge swathes of prime coastal land, drives villagers out of their homes and fisherfolk off the beach, and up-ends the ecology as well. The Tiracol villagers belong to the first category, being already involved in tourism in myriad ways: running or working in numerous small restaurants, or supplying fish or feni to the establishments of others. And they would be happy to see more hotels and restaurants in their village, they say. But not something that will swallow the whole place.
A crucial difference between two tourisms is that the corporate one is backed by the government. And that is where Leading Hotels’ brute arrogance comes from. Their project is also reportedly part of the Central Government’s Large Revenue-Generating Scheme, in which they can hope to get up to Rs 50 crores of public money as a state subsidy. Isn’t that great, public money being handed over to those who are driving the public into penury? It is good sign of who the BJP ‘Make in India’ slogan is aimed at, and who is expected to pay the price.
(Amita Kanekar is an architectural
historian and novelist.)
