The suburb of Borda is no more an outskirt of Margao but is an extension of the growing town of Margao and is part of the commercial capital of Goa. From corporate offices, to warehouses to servicing centers to commercial shops and supermarkets, Borda which once was a small pocket where people built homes and moved into spacious flats in the vicinity of Margao town, has it all.
“All that has changed now. Now there is space for anything. The open spaces are scarce, no safe legroom to walk on the main Borda road, traffic congestion is horrible and even worse Borda houses warehouses and even doctors and dentists have moved to Borda,” explains Jeevan D’Costa who moved to Borda 25 years back from Quepem to allow his children to go to better school.
Stray dogs and garbage is also the menace of Borda. Bags ripped open by stray dogs with adult diapers, sanitary pads, rotten food and fruit skins is a usual takeaway in every bylane of Borda. The door-to-door collection fails every 15 days and the dustbin is sometimes left stinking.
“When I decided to contest under the Fatorda Forward panel, I was reflecting on what really would I do for the next five years. And I feel I need to put all my energy in clearing the garbage menace,” says ward 9 councillor Pooja Naik.
Naik explains that solving the garbage menace doesn’t involve just picking up the garbage everyday or cleaning up the mini dumps that people create every morning and on which dogs feast.
“Clearing the garbage menace involves educating people to sort garbage, collecting different kinds of garbage separately and giving recycling a priority, avoiding dumping of garbage in open spaces or along the road and also finding a way to store garbage for collection which is inaccessible to the stray animal,” Naik says, hoping she can give garbage a priority.
She says the Fatorda Forward panel has also resolved to reduce people’s visit to the municipality to zero which means going to the residents and picking their papers if documents like income certificate, birth certificate or even certain permissions and correspondences are needed. “Why should the people go to the municipality and stand in long queues or keep going back. I want to be the point of contact to do all people’s documentation at the municipality at all times,” Naik asserts.
“In my first stint, I provided people infrastructure, in the sense I built gutters, put gutter covers, built gardens in open spaces, did people’s jobs but the cry then and now is garbage. We need concrete solutions for a better flow in the door-to-door collection or we need more trucks to collect dry waste separately,” feels Tito Cardozo who is one of the few who returned as a councillor.
Cardozo points out how many people own flats for investment purposes but do live in them. He says that without money nothing can be achieved and hence the council and the councillor need to rise above politics and work in recovering house tax dues.
“There are too many defaulters and the council has a huge amount as outstanding from the house tax. I want my ward to have paid all dues and that the municipality should have more revenue. Its only then we can function better,” stated Cardozo.
Similarly Glen Andrade an engineer elected to the Margao council for the first time from ward 10, which consist of many heritage homes, asserts that streamlining of the garbage collection system is the need of the hour and should a project for the youth.
Andrade believes that on his side of Borda, the unevenly build road and its gutter needs alignment and that the gutters need to be covered properly to encourage people to walk and avoid driving for short distance.
“I have a list of 10 things to do and focus on in this term. But everything needs to begin with making Borda garbage free and then we’ll look at other areas,” he says.
