In the context of Manohar Parrikar’s moving to the Centre one can say Goa’s loss is Delhi’s gain. It is more of a gain for Delhi than so much of a loss for Goa. This is being stated since Parrikar’s two innings as CM one can at most say has been chequered. He is very much an overrated engineer and an administrator.
As an administrator one has not seen very much of ground-breaking legislation and his truncated first innings as CM was marred by controversial constructions for creating the infrastructure for IFFI. In his second innings as CM one can again say that he has been rather ineffective even though he was half-way through his term. Again here he failed to deliver on many promises like clamping down on illegal mining for which he himself as PAC Chairman had put the figure at Rs 20,000 crores or so. But after he took over as CM there have been no concrete measures taken by him to go after the illegal mining mafia. Not only that he has been under one pretext or other been going back to the same local miners or leaseholders that has been having a stranglehold on mining in the State without auctioning the leases.
In terms of ground breaking you can talk only about his penchant for putting up buildings, construction of roads and bridges which most politicians do to some extent or other since they understand little else. Again involving oneself in construction projects is beneficial to the politicians, maybe not specifically in the case of Parrikar, and the party. As an engineer, one can say that at the cost of local and departmental engineering expertise he has had this tendency to take the onus on himself on decision making on technical matters or depending on unknown foreign firms and has ended up in taking patently wrong decisions.
This tendency of his has alienated local engineering bureaucracy to the extent of demoralising them because of their being sidelined. Other than this there is a long list of idiosyncrasies of his which he will have to avoid if he has to be effective in Delhi since the scale of operations that he will now be exposed to is phenomenally large.
In any case one wishes him well since after all a Goan at the helm of an important Central ministry has been a long time coming. If he were becoming Defence Minister then maybe he could decide to ask the Indian Navy to move out of Dabolim! Also the misconceived projects of his like the Mopa Airport, the 3rd Mandovi Bridge and the contracts to LKS Infrastructure for our principal cities would be summarily dropped. Manohar Parrikar, we wish you all the best in Delhi!
