Team Herald
MARGAO: In a meandering gram sabha that lasted five hours, the Betalbatim villagers approved a surplus budget that was already sent to the BDO in the month of March and the only highlight was that they succeeded in driving away police personnel from the Local Information Bureau who had come for the meeting.
The meeting that started at 10:30 am ended at 3:30 pm and of these five hours a good one-and-a-half hour was spent on reading and confirming the minutes of the previous meeting with a lot of digs taken at the previous secretary’s command over English language as the minutes had many grammatical errors.
Villager Samson Cotta argued that such badly written minutes were not acceptable when the Sarpanch is a retired headmaster and pointed out that instead of writing “they opposed the project” the secretary had conveniently written “they were with the people” with respect to the discussion on the two hotels proposed next to each other in the village.
After this former minister Francisco alias Mickey Pacheco questioned the presence of three unknown persons who were present for the gram sabha and sought to know their identity and purpose for being present.
Sarpanch Constancio Miranda, while disclosing that they were from the police department, inadvertently said that the deputy sarpanch had called them and this led to an uproar with villagers asking whether the panchayat members feared that they would be attacked by the villagers and refused to accept the Sarpanch’s clarification that they were only “informed” about the gram sabha.
After spending 20 minutes on this matter Mickey moved a motion asking that the police personnel be asked to leave and the three persons walked out of the hall where the gram sabha was held and only after that the gram sabha commenced.
The villagers approved a surplus budget for the financial year 2019-20 with a few changes as recommended by the villagers. The budget had an opening balance of Rs 35.89 lakhs and total receipts of Rs 1.42 crore and expenditure projected at Rs 1.33 crore thus having a surplus of Rs. 8.69 lakhs.
Sarpanch informed that though the budget was already sent to the BDO in March 2019 any changes recommended by the villagers would be incorporated and sent again to the BDO. Accordingly villagers made suggestions like getting a compound wall constructed for the school and increasing the lay out for natural calamity, tree plantation and desilting of wells.
Farmers from Nagvaddo who raised the issue of cattle of one person from Per Seraulim destroying their crops were informed that the panchayat has not only written to the owner of the cattle but also to Seraulim panchayat and the Agriculture Department about this matter.
While one farmer said he was the only one cultivating his field because he invested Rs 5 lakhs to fence his field and other farmers had stopped cultivating and hence appealed to the panchayat to fence all the fields with assistance from the agriculture department.
A villager Seby Fernandes who alleged that food stuff from the fair price shop was sold at a premium and said a rice sack was being sold for Rs 1,200, the Sarpanch asked him to complain to the Civil Supplies Department about it.
