For a long time PWD (Roads), being the custodian of roads as well as the party to be blamed for the bad state, used to be the agency which used to grant the permissions for any road cutting. In fact, even up to the tenure of Digambar Kamat as Power Minister permission for laying the underground power cables were given by the PWD Road Digging Authority. The depth as prescribed by IS 1255 was mandated as well as the horizontal and vertical clearances from water mains, etc. Considering the depth re-instatement was to be carried out concurrently and before full consolidation, PWD put up a Demand Estimate to Power Grid Corp with a double layer of soiling so as to achieve arching action over the trench. The road tenders were for an extended time limit so as to execute the project in sequenced manner as described. Hence there was no distress caused to the road users circa 1984-86, during the first tenure of the Parrikar Regime.
The subsequent Government established a Road Digging Committee headed by the District Magistrate and thereby removed the accountability for road reinstatement. It is not known if this was to get over the “nuisance “of the PWD Authority who had an accent on reinstatement of the road before allowing to dig, and the PWD engineers felt empowered to confiscate tools and file cases against unauthorized digging.
Permissions came to be granted without reinstatement provisions in the digging work. It would be interesting to know who the initiator of this new Road Digging Authority was. This is the reason we see innumerable roads which had been dug up and left unmotorable for years.
It is not known if this state of affairs was in the mind of Parrikar when he formed the Government in 2012, and referred to the mal-administration or whatever as the worst legacy of the Kamat Government even worse than the state of widespread corruption which was the only reason that brought BJP to power in Goa. Under this state of anarchy setup, PWD is just the visible whipping boy without the wherewithal to do amends. Unfortunately , 2 ½ years down the line Parrikar has shot upstairs without addressing neither the ills of maladministration or corruption or mining or RP – RIP Goa.
