Team Herald
PANJIM: Raising serious concern about the accumulation of garbage on beaches with Drishti Lifesaving Ltd ceasing beach cleaning work, Deputy Speaker and Calangute BJP MLA Michael Lobo on Monday rushed to Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar for his immediate intervention, fearing the situation will affect tourism inflow in the coastal State.
Lobo has approached the Chief Minister with a request to hand over beach cleaning contract to the Solid Waste Management Corporation (SWMC), rather than allowing a private agency through tourism department to take care of cleaning. Parrikar has assured Lobo to resolve the beach cleaning issue by Tuesday.
Drishti, a private agency, which has been contracted the work of collecting garbage from the beaches since December 2016, has stopped working since last four days as their contract with the State Tourism Department has not been renewed.
“I have brought to the notice of the Chief Minister that the entire beach cleaning tender process is a scam and if not acted upon now, it will end up the way it ended up during then Tourism Minister (Dilip Parulekar) tenure. It will be another scam,” he said. The entire tender is for Rs 15 crore, for which only one party has bid so far.
“Chief Minister has called his principal secretary Krishnamurthy tomorrow (Tuesday). He has assured me that the issue will be resolved by Tuesday,” he added.
Lobo has urged Chief Minister to take necessary action against the tourism department officials involved in the entire tender scam.
Earlier in the day, Lobo met Chief Secretary IAS Dharmendra Sharma and demanded immediate cancellation of the tender floated by the tourism department.
Stating that the tourism department has no expertise to handle the beach cleaning, Lobo, director of SWMC, demanded that the contract be transferred to the Corporation, which is been set up to deal with waste/ garbage, failing which will move Court through a writ petition.
“GSWMC has required expertise and requisite engineers and environmental experts to do justice to this job. We will handle all the collection, transportation and disposal of waste,” he said.
He said that the entire tender process is a case o over estimating the budgets and costing the State huge losses or a work that is being done at a much lower price by the same department.
Lobo said that the scene on State’s beaches is grim, and gradually it will start affecting the tourism footfalls during the peak season starting from this month. “The quality of tourists that is foreign tourists has already reduced. Any further crisis will worsen the situation,” he said.
Coastal belt MLA said that with 50 percent of the State population being dependent on tourism industry directly or indirectly for livelihood, it is government duty to protect it.
