If you happen to be on a voyage of the ‘Titanic’ from Southampton to New York in 1912, it did not matter if you held a first class ticket or a third class ticket, on that dreadful day, barring a few, most were going down in the cold waters of the Atlantic. A warning sign for Goans that there is a limit we can insulate ourselves in our ivory towers, with infrastructure crumbling outside our domain, it’s just a matter of time, the outside situation will not have an effect on us.
Goa had a terrible month of May as far as the pandemic was concerned and although the medical fraternity put their heart and soul in saving lives, the infrastructure did not keep pace and eventually gave way resulting in death and misery to many. Even though Goa has a comparatively better doctor/patient ratio and hospital bed/population ratio, it did not stop the system being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the problem.
This is not the time to do a post mortem because it is an ongoing unresolved issue, but considering our pathetic opposition parties and our memory failing us most of the time, we run the risk this event would not have thought us anything and will be buried by the time the pandemic subsides. So how come Goa in a position of control during the first wave of the pandemic had the worse data points in the country, by the time the second wave hit the state?
Did we import too many tourists and along with them the virus from cities such as Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore, which were then exploding with cases with the situation going out of hand there? Did the government decision to keep the borders unchecked for everybody to enter, had something to do with one fourth of the MLAs holding financial stake in Goa’s tourism industry? While India was taking advantage of the new normal and converting ‘work from home’ to ‘work from Goa’ considering Goa was still clean, green and breathable compared to other parts of India, did Goa just allow overcrowding to take place, without taking into consideration that the infrastructure is going to give way, with scant respect to those that are inhabiting this place?
This is exactly the situation where Government has to play a role by way of regulation as to how many people can live in Goa, locals plus tourists, at any point of time. Building of infrastructure private or public is usually designed with some estimates in mind as to how many people it can serve. For example if all customers of the biggest and financially strong bank decide they transact with the bank on the same day or visit the ATM and withdraw cash on the same very day, suffice to say the banks infrastructure is going to collapse. The bank could even be run over because the customers after seeing ATM’s dry of cash could assume the bank is in some sort of trouble. This is not some made up scenario but played in real, some years back in one of India’s biggest private bank. The short point being that there is a limit a bank can serve at a time, over and above that is detrimental to its existence. This is how online websites crash on important heavy traffic day even though they invest in the best technology, because it is not designed to serve everybody at the same time.
Goa’s medical infrastructure was unable to serve the sudden increase of patients because it was not designed to serve that many patients at a given point of time, even if we had one of the best patient/doctor ratios in the country. To make matters worse we did not stop entry of long term tourists who were running away from their place and trying to settle on a temporary basis in Goa. So here comes the big question again, how many people should be staying in Goa at any given time? Some ratio will have to be worked out quickly with focus being given on tourist bed/local population ratio. For a change let the Directorate of Planning and Statistics do some worthwhile work and show us the numbers. This is where Town Planning department of the government comes into play and not to just extort money to clear proposals.
It all easy to say everybody has the right to stay anywhere in the country, but imagine all Goans decide to one day land up in Himachal Pradesh. The Governor of Goa has the best real estate, does not mean all Goans have the right to squat on that property. Just imagine if all Goans decide they will live only in one village, will it even work. The city of Bombay welcomed everybody with open arms, but do we care to find out how the original people were elbowed out? The ‘Marathi Manoos’ hardly has any financial stake in the Bombay Stock Market membership which is controlled by the chosen few. Bombay has become the maximum city to everybody, while the locals are made to fight for minimum sustenance.
Bombay is the biggest lesson Goans ought to learn from, its deterioration of living standards of the local people because they could simply not withstand the onslaught of moneyed people that came with open borders. Many settlers of Bombay such as the Parsee community did add value to the place but also there were others who not only added numbers and used up its resources but also negated the good work done by the Parsee community. Today Bombay is not as clean as the Parsees had hoped for, at least in some pockets.
Overcrowding of Goa or for that matter any pristine State is something everybody has to be concerned about and needs debate at the State and national level. We need to work with ratios and till Government does not have the desired ratios in place it should not encourage people to move in. The makers of Titanic planned everything right, before they undertook their maiden voyage; unfortunately it sunk because it hit an iceberg. Goa does not even have a plan in place and leaving our destiny to chance could only have a disastrous impact on the local population irrespective the tower you live in.
(The author is a business consultant)