PANJIM: The land in Panjim municipal market which is presently occupied by the 2 Signal Training Centre (2STC) will in most probability be returned to the Corporation of the City of Panjim as the Defense Ministry has nearly given its nod.
Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar said the land could be utilized as open space for parking of four-wheelers. “We will finalize in consultation with the CCP. I have told the State government to put up a proposal with the Defense Ministry. We will approve it as the military authority has agreed to it,” he told reporters on Saturday.
The CCP has been fighting to take over the land admeasuring 4,969 square mts to utilize for multi-storey car parking in a bid to decongest the city. Former CCP Mayor Surendra Furtado had, last November, written to Parrikar informing about the resolution taken in July 2013 to approach the Union Defense ministry to transfer the land back to the corporation.
“We have already given the army alternate land on the outskirts of the city and asked them to hand over the place (plot occupied by the 2STC headquarters), but they are not doing it for years now,” Parrikar had said on July 18, 2012, in the assembly while discussing the issue of getting the military to return land they occupied in Goa.
During the tenure of Pratapsing Rane as CM, the government had allotted alternate land to the defense force at Bambolim on pre-condition to vacate the Panjim land. Parrikar, as Goa chief minister in July 2012, had pointed out in the legislative assembly about military refusing to vacate the premise.
