It’s 3pm on a gloomy rainy Tuesday and the Herald decides to head to the SGPDA (South Goa Planning and Development Authority) office located in the Osia Complex, Margao adjoining the SGPDA Margao.
The office is on the 4th floor where the building lift is not working and there’s no signage to the office. To make matters worse, the walls are pan stained and the staircases leading to the office are filthy. An old activist fighting to save Goa’s wetlands crawls his way up to the SGPDA office to inspect the draft plan and suggests as to why the SGPDA can put the plan on display on the ground floor and keep a box for suggestion.
The office has the false ceiling, portion of which has collapsed with dampness from the monsoons and is a scare at the entrance itself and unwelcoming for a SGPDA office that has hundreds of people coming for construction licences, conversions of zones and for inquiries for construction rules.
When Herald inquired with the clerk where the Draft ODP to inspect was, he leads us to a dark corridor at the back of the office behind the accounts section. In a narrow corridor lies a freshly pasted plan with signatures of Francis D’Souza, Deputy Chief Minister and T Puturaju, Chief Town Planner. The staff on one side of the office was all missing. Keeping the Ganesh holidays and the long weekend in mind, the staff during office hours was exchanging Ganesh sweets and goodies prepared by the women staff in the SGPDA office.
Shailesh Bhagat, an employee at the SGPDA, was asked for the Outline Development Plan of 2016. Bhagat said that he had a copy behind his desk and Herald team could compare it with the draft of ODP 2026.
With no option left Herald team has to spread the SGPDA’s Margao ODP 2016 on the floor and use the notebook to straighten out the dog eared edges.
Only after discussion Shailesh and the clerk agreed to stick the Margao ODP of 2016 on the wall besides the draft ODP 2026, so that citizens could do a real time comparison.
Laurel Abranches, a Margao based activist had informed Herald that the new draft doesn’t highlight the changes from 2016 ODP and neither makes a list of the same and the SGPDA forces individuals to manually compare a vast plan and find out the changes itself. In fact the SGPDA chairman tells, Abranches said, to figure out “where your house is and you study the ODP around it, why you want to look at the entire plan.”
“At the end of the day, this is just a draft, we have to appoint a technical committee, study suggestions and complaints of people and even at that stage, if we want to add more to this plan in terms of conversion, addition, increasing settlement zones from agricultural and orchard, then we can do this, so this Draft ODP means nothing,” states SGPDA chairman Mauvin Godinho.
“Margao is a very difficult place to work. So many NGOs come and stall construction and have so many questions on land conversion and all and it’s difficult to develop Margao,” explains SGPDA’s member secretary Ashok Kumar who seems more pro-development and doesn’t care for increased open spaces, gardens and saving the low lying bodies.
When Herald inquired about the land settlement and conversion of water bodies and hills into construction plots, he said “the SGPDA won’t allow but in case agriculture land is besides a resident zone and can be extended, then the SGPDA is capable of allowing conversion even after this plan takes shape.”
“The ODP has clearly shown all the existing roads and all our proposed roads. We’ve made minimal changes from 2016 but we’ve added some more commercial, residential zones to fit in the growing population of the city while we tried to keep a balance on the green spaces. The plan will take shape in four months.”
