KARSTEN MIRANDA
karsten@herald-goa.com
There have been promises galore at every election to the Margao Municipal Council (MMC) to put the town’s markets in order. Every chairperson promises it and yet, year after year, the market conditions continue in the same shambles for a lack of will and desire to set things in order.
The blame lies on the MMC for failing to carry out reforms in the market, be it from an infrastructure and planning point of view or taking action against rampant subletting or failure of tax recovery.
There are numerous issues plaguing the Gandhi Market and New Market but the predominant issue faced by the public on a daily basis is narrow passage ways in and around the market.
Not only do pedestrians find it difficult to walk in the market, finding parking around the market is a nightmare and as a result the roads outside the market are chock-a-block with two-wheelers parked haphazardly narrowing the carriageway even further.
The trader’s associations have pointed out that they have sat down with the traffic police and MMC and even proposed a pay-parking system that would sort out the issue but walk into any of the two markets on any given day and one has to spend more than 15 minutes just getting in and out of the market area.
Encroachments of the passage ways in the market area have been a recurring problem for the municipality and despite its anti-encroachment drives, the public complain that this is just a temporary fix and the encroachments return the next day. Strict measures enforced by MMC have resulted in protests led by traders over these drives and it ultimately leads to gaps in the final implementation of the drives.
While the MMC has often shifted the onus on the vendors for preventing the civic body of taking serious action, the vendors are at loggerheads with the municipality for failing to carry out infrastructure development in the market such as installation of an overhead tank, or carrying out repairs of existing structures.
However a sore issue that has deepened the trust deficiency between the two vendor associations and the market is the MMC giving permissions to exhibitions-cum-sales that are weeklong fairs at the SGPDA ground that eat into the market vendors’ profits.
Recently the functioning of the MMC had come to a halt after vendors swarmed the municipality building demanding for a ban on the exhibitions. “We have been consistently cheated by the MMC for years and now this is the last time we demand a resolution stopping all exhibitions-cum-sales in Margao,” said New market association president Vinod Shirodkar.
Their grouse is that they have to pay various fees to the municipality and after paying for various licenses to operate their shops in the markets, the exhibition sales in a short span of time sell the same goods at far cheaper rates thus putting them at a great loss.
There was hope recently that that the appointment of MMC’s first IAS chief officer would solve this problem. Navin had wanted to introduce a system where the municipal markets identified with property ID number thereby widening MMC’s tax net and measures to look into those traders who had managed to evade sopo tax, trade license and renewal fees. Navin also envisaged gathering data about the trade licenses issued by the municipality to examine the type of illegalities existing in the licensing process and also the legal sanctity of regularization of sopo payers by the MMC.
One other key issue across the five years of the current municipal term there have been several major cases of fire breaking out in the market areas causing losses running into crores of rupees to vendors. For the last five years, vendors had demanded that MMC complete the construction of an overhead tank for use of the fire services at the earliest even as inspections had confirmed that the fire hydrants were not working.
With the MMC failing to identify alternate land for installing overhead water tank for hydrants, the civic body officials, market vendors and PWD officials held a meeting recently where it was decided to re-draw the plan for the tank and accommodate it in the Gandhi market site.
The PWD had sought around 100 sq mts land for the water tank from MMC. MMC had initially mulled over an area near the old fish market opposite MMC building, but bad planning had seen that MMC had identified the same site for the multi-storery building and thus the location for the tank had to be shifted.
While that plan is yet to materialize the council had then decided to make use of less than 20 sq mts land in the Gandhi market.
Shirodkar warned the civic body to complete the process before the imposition of the model code of conduct for civic polls.
