Tourists to Goa come to filth and tourism babus fly (Herald Editorial)

07 Oct, 2014, 12:42AM IST

If facts are to be told, then Goa’s preparations for welcoming 1.5 million tourists, is akin to a wedding which has gone terribly wrong. Even as the organisers are flying all over the world, to get in more guests, some others have come in to see the hosts in a total state of disarray.

Tourists from all over the country, converged to spend their just concluded five day ‘weekend' to disastrous infrastructure, dirt, bad roads and filth. It’s another matter that the quality of tourists also left too much to be desired.

The four to five kilometer radius of Baga and Calangute, became a filthy cage, drawing thousands of tourists like a magnet and trapping them. The same will extend to more parts of Goa as the season begins, with roads dug, wires and cables exposed, the beach shacks not allotted and court cases flying thick and fast between stakeholders of tourism and the government.

With a mess on the ground, officials of the special marketing and promotion committee of the Goa Tourism Development Corporation are on a whirlwind global tour crisscrossing continents and doing road shows to get tourists from Russia, France, Japan, Australia and the USA. And why would they come to Goa, you may ask. To this?

a) There’s a battle royale going on at the National Green Tribunal, against shacks being on beaches and sand dunes because it affects dunes and affects the marine biodiversity.

b) There’s a direct conflict between private beach shack owners and temporary ones, with the government muscle flexing by planning to have some  temporary shacks in front of the private ones to deny them business.

c) The other non private shacks  are not pleased either since plotting of shacks (deciding the exact location of each) is not complete and there’s no knowing when allotments will finally be done.

d) The promise of clean toilets, CCTV cameras on beaches and shacks and addressing the issue of segregating, collecting, disposing and treating garbage, has not been met or actually even discussed, making the tourism policy another piece of waste paper.

e) The issue of haphazard taxi fares charged by taxi operators continues to remain unresolved. The government has still not managed to introduce GPRS controlled radio taxis, or have fare meters and proper charts for local taxis

f) The roads in Baga and Calangute are dug and left open adding to traffic blockades, ditto for most parts of Panjim and in areas of South Goa.

On issues like this debates and counter views are an absolute no brainer. The above facts are hard ground realities. The reasons why we are in such a state may be many and perhaps there are many who are accountable and will be made to be, in some state of utopia. But how can Goa woo tourists when it is not ready to receive them.

One article or editorial is not supposed to provide answers but perhaps a few common sense pointers may help in seeing through the haze of euphoria about charter flights landing and the tourist influx swelling.

What Goa’s tourism consultants do not fathom, is that they cannot give their tourists a Goa experience only within the sanitized environs of five star hotels. The beach experience, the road experience and the travelling experience within Goa adds up to the Goa experience and this is being abandoned year after year.

The solution Herald suggests needs a rebooting of our tourism planning. The government must demarcate the main tourism areas into zones and have an authority that handles all infrastructure within that zone. Right from drawing the ODP and village maps, to long term planning to permissions to monitoring of systems must fall under this authority run by professionals under the nodal tourism department to ensure accountability. However the authority needs to function as a total autonomous manner. The multi-agency and multi-disciplinary approach to managing tourism zones splits accountability. The functioning of the authorities will have intense stakeholder involvement and participation. Above all time bound decisions will have to be taken, without the customary inter departmental buck passing.

Solutions such as these will not repair the damage done this year, nor will it even get some patchwork done before the peak period of November-December. However not looking at radical leaps of faith, will take the next five years or more under after which there will be nothing left to save or  get the world to come to. It is already that way. But that doesn’t seem to ring any alarm bells within the tourism department. Their officials are waiting at some international departure lounge, waiting for the boarding call to some exotic destination.

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