A discussion has been raging about the shutting down of the Mother Teresa’s home in Panaji. Various statements have been floating about the reasons for its closure. But in the cross-fire of exchanges and allegations, what was completely forgotten are that both the Missionaries of Charity and Assistencia da Goa are charitable organisations that need to have adequate finances for carrying out their respective objectives. Towards this, both the State and the community need to rise in support.
This is not the first time that housing spaces/hostels have been left with no choice but to shut down. The organisations that have created and been managing these spaces, with their office bearers’ and membership’s volunteer efforts, are now in a situation, where despite their willingness to provide their quality and quantity time, and services, and even contribute financially, cannot manage the colossal amount required to defray infrastructure and engagement of service providers and management expenses.
Yet, because of their passion, and commitment, they are the very organisations that are ideal to run or provide services to the marginalised sections of society. That however does not take away from the fact that the Government and the society as a whole — and more particularly its privileged sections have the responsibility of making sure that the last person in the city is taken care of and can lead a life of dignity. It is the Government and the privileged in the society that must provide resources and contribute to the resources respectively.
It was heartwarming as well as heart-wrenching to hear on a Youtube video, with narrations of the many women who have been supported by the Missionaries of Charity, as they bade farewell to a place which was once their home, and to which they turned, even after they each made their homes elsewhere. This is the same sentiment that should also prevail when homes of people who are living in a place for centuries are destroyed, in the name of development, or can no longer be maintained by the charitable organisations, because of the demands of development, and the restrictions of Government, including weaponising the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act.
You have only to look for how carpenter families, fishing families and the barber families have been locked in or cast out over time in Panjim, to know how spaces for the local people, especially those on the margins, can shrink — and now at a galloping speed. The Inland Waterways Act, 2016, the Major Port Authorities Act, 2021, and the Smart Cities Mission (without even a law to back it), are potent weapons in the hands of a corporate State that is unpeople-centric.
The Government of India’s Smart City website states that smart cities must be cities that work. One would think in the context of the Constitution of India that the smart cities must work for all — for the last person. It must have spaces for the homes for marginalized sections of society, its transport must be accessible to all — not just to card-holders as the bus driver or conductor on the Smart City buses is suggesting or asked to suggest, its facilities must be accessible to all. A city cannot become smart by denying the existence of these marginalised sections. Smartness lies in ensuring that the cities are liveable, sustainable and have a thriving economy offering multiple opportunities to its people to pursue their diverse interests, as the Government’s own website suggests.
But what do we see? The Government is constantly trying to outsource its public spaces, and citizens have to continuously fight back. A petition is lying before the High Court of Bombay at Goa challenging the denotification and transfer of a public pay parking area near the Panjim Ferry Wharf for the exclusive use of guests of M/s Golden Peace Infrastructure Pvt Ltd — the company that is operating the offshore Casino Pride 2.
Earlier an attempt to commercialise a portion of the children’s park at Campal for a ticketed Waste to Art Display Park, was thwarted by the active resistance of public spirited citizens, and consequent intervention of the Panjim MLA. The attempt to commercialise came under the garb of promoting tourism. But citizens were quick to respond that while tourists are free to enjoy the parks, it cannot be done by locking out the local people. However, these attempts at taking away or exclusivising public spaces surreptitiously resurface in benign garbs.
More recently, the tagline for this exclusivising initiative has been ‘women’s safety’. Women’s safety cannot be ensured by suggesting that they confine themselves to what are designated as ‘women’s zones’. One such zone has been designated at Miramar. There are tourist police in the coastal areas and they must ensure protection of women, be they tourists or local women, instead of these zones. The way the State is operating, designation of certain areas as women’s zones will become the slippery slope down which other exclusivisation will follow. Already fisherpeople have been systematically displaced from their livelihoods, when the further reclamation and expansion of the Children’s Park took place at the time of introduction of International Film Festival of India in Panjim.
Clearly spaces are shrinking for those who must actually have the first rights to the spaces. Corporatisation and gentrification are taking over. There must be an inventorisation of the traditional uses of spaces in the capital city, but the Outline Development Plans prepared under the Town and Country Planning Act, which are actually supposed to do this detailing, do anything but that.
There is no substitute for democratic planning with the involvement of citizens. The 74th amendment to the Constitution of India stipulated the setting up of ward committees. But this has been intercepted by the Smart City concept, which while being inclusive in its vision has been exclusive in how its processes are visualized. The Special Purpose Vehicle —Imagine Panaji Smart City Development Limited (IPSCDL) in the case of Panjim, is a non-elected body, a wholly owned Government Company, designed in a way as to assert corporate control over the city. It is inherently a model of outsourced governance. Therefore, along with challenging each shrinking space and non-provision of public spaces in cities, we need to fundamentally challenge these undemocratic means of governance, which infest the policies these bodies follow. Else we will only be unwittingly wallowing in an incestuous cesspool of governance.
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer and human rights activist)