Goa's Green Pieces- soter

Published in Herald, 10 June 2015

The unedited version of this article is as below:

Goa’s green pieces

The Tiracol village seems to be the latest destination for activist tourism. Almost ten years after the historic ‘Save Goa’ brand captured the Goan consumer market, villagers are still left desperately defending their lands and their livelihoods from leading hotels and real estate developers who continue their plunder backed by infantries of bureaucrats, bulldozers and bouncers. So also, while select projects face an activist attack, several as much devastating projects, if not more, are allowed a smooth passage along hill slopes, in mangroves and low-lying areas across Goa. What is the ordinary Goan to understand from this?

Of course, one cannot deny that some environment protection groups have managed some unthinkable successes on the environment front over the years, the most recent being against illegal mining. But, in an economy which is about social entrepreneurship, the evils of competition, closed circles, rivalry, exhibitionism, extortion and other such ailments have crept into this sector thereby blunting the impact of such environment protection interventions. Those with political ambitions or others with sectarian agendas also infiltrate as ring masters in the environment circus. This indeed makes it difficult to identify genuine environment movements from those with a conflict of interest.      

It is unfair to solely blame politicians for the betrayal on the Regional Plan. There are also those with a conflict of interest who have used the vehicle of people’s movements to occupy space on Government committees and block the possibility of people’s participation in land-use planning and development. This is exactly why some groups are cleverly dissociating the Regional Plan issue from the debate on the out-dated Town and Country Planning structures, the Seventy-Third and Seventy-fourth Constitution Amendments and the controversial Land Zoning and Building Construction Rules. Therefore, destruction of mangroves in Panjim and brazen disregard for the rights of the local people like at Tiracol and other places across Goa, continues to occur because people’s movements get hijacked to safeguard the professional and business interests of those in the construction and mining industry.

What is defeating the people of Goa is their blind submission to such forces in ‘good faith’. The misinterpretation about ‘action in good faith’ unfortunately leads to unquestioned and undiscerning support to popularised people’s movements. Even though Goa may figure in the top of the charts in the country when it comes to environment campaigns, why is it that green peace still evades the State? It is because what we seem to have in Goa are green pieces which appear content with publicity and the consolation of having achieved individual project targets, unconcerned about whether it strengthens or weakens the collective interests. In fact, since Goa is a tiny State with a meagre percentage of citizens active on the environment front, the rational strategy should have been to forge a unified environmental force on the lines of an initiative like the National Alliance of People’s Movement (NAPM). But will the green egos, disguised politician as activist, sectarianists and agents of the industry allow this to ever happen?