Cora was not informed that the road along her house would be taken up for expansion on that particular day. The GSIDC moved an earth crusher and flattened the dirt outside her house thus ripping her Internet and electricity line, damaging her water supply pipe leaving her isolated inside her house with rubble outside their gate and their car blocked inside their garage. All this meant that Cora and her husband, both senior citizens, were stranded inside their house and had no means to escape the noise and dust pollution.
The PWD has carried out a shoddy job whilst widening the road from Colva circle Margao junction to Colva Police station which proceeds right down to Maria Hall Benaulim and winds up further down to Cavelossim, where the BRIC delegates will be housed in the starred hotels along the coast.
The stories in the locality heard are horrendous with slum dwellers getting homeless overnight and nowhere to go, massive trees chain-sawed to the ground, people’s water supply lines ripped and disrupted in the road widening; some people’s water supply pipes crushed by the road rollers, or shops and establishments suddenly not finding the approach or the sidewalk outside their house completely bull dozed. Some houses on a higher gradient are so badly levelled that they are yet to determine a manner as to how they’re going to construct the approach to their homes and how they’ll make arrangements for their vehicles to be driven into their car parking.
“The entire work from the Colva circle Margao junction right down to Colva Police station junction is a work of four-lanning with cable ducts on either side. I completely support the work but the manner in which it is done and the way in which the local MLA has been sidelined and kept in the dark is what makes this work unacceptable. Development works need to happen but not at the cost of hurting the locals’ sentiments,” explains an agitated Caitu Silva, Benaulim MLA.
Similarly Juvenia Soares shows us how the tree cover is completely destroyed from the Menino Jesus café, Mungul up to the Colva Church, three kms away which now can be seen in the skyline.
“The 8th Brazil-China-India-Russia-South Africa Summit is to discuss environment with PM Narendra Modi, Russia’s Vladmir Putin and other global leaders but the widening of the road is an effort to completely demolish the environment by chopping down trees. The question then is what are the BRICS nations going to discuss in Goa,” questions Juvenia’s neighbour Silbert Furtado.
“We’ve completed most of the asphalting works from Colva Police station to Cavelossim and a little is left till Mobor but now on the Margao-Colva stretch we will only asphalt the existing road, while GSIDC, we believe, will only flatten the extended portion but it won’t be handed over to the PWD for asphalting and tarring,” stated PWD Engineer Ratnakar Challan, an Assistant Engineer, overlooking all BRICS summit facelift and upgradation work.
Ratnakar said he’s confident that all road works and patching of the highway will be done as scheduled, much ahead of the BRICS conference though now it’s known that the controversial road expansion works along the Colva road will not be completed and handed over to the PWD for tarring.
Meanwhile Deputy Collector Arun Panchwadkar involved in the BRICS work informed Herald that he’s only in charge of demolition and merely works as ‘a labourer for demolition’ on the orders of the PWD or Margao Municipality or Panchayats of Seraulim and Colva.
“My office has very little say and to do for the BRICS road developmental works and the powers are with the PWD to work and execute. Hence they alone can speak whether the work will be completed on time,” stated Panchwadkar.
With mud, boulders, gutters destroyed, water bodies in the fields disrupted, rubble flung into the cultivated fields, debris and dust everywhere, destroyed entrances to homes and shops, this war torn kind of damage seems a mammoth task to finish for the PWD before the summit.
“In Cavelossim after the underground cabling work, the roads were not fixed for over two years and people suffered and so many accidents took place and so many lives were lost. Now it’s surprising that just a BRICS Summit, Goa gets more publicity and a facelift than what the activists and Goans daily ask and fight for tooth and nail,” exclaimed Cyril Cotta.
