A recent disclosure by Claude Alvares based on inspection of files under the Right to Information Act, that the Electricity Department is preparing for additional 220 KV on top of 400 KV line already proposed under Tamnar for five SEZs coming up all over Goa, is alarming both because of what this additionally portends for Goa, and also for the fact that people in Goa are not kept posted about these proposed developments.
It may be recalled that following initiatives and movements like SEZ Watch, SEZ Virodhi Manch and Peoples’ Movement Against SEZs, the then Congress Government under the then chief minister Digambar Kamat had given a New Year gift to Goans in 2008 by scrapping the all the SEZs that were approved. Digambar Kamat is now a MLA who has crossed over to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
It is clear that successive governments have not really intended to scrap SEZs, but only called them by different names. From Export Promotion Zones to SEZs to even a proposal for what is ironically called DESH (Development of Enterprise and Services Hub), it has all along been old wine in different bottles. It is about providing huge spaces for big corporations and their townships on a platter in the name of promotion of quality industry and relaxation of statutory planning provisions and procedures, and non-participation of people.
This is the antithesis of
development.
As a matter of fact, Goa’s policies like IT Policy, Biotechnology Policy, and provisions for Special Tourism Areas, Investment Promotion Areas - all are meant for big industry to invade, without making any provisions for employment of local people.
The opaqueness of the whole process, and the lack of requirement to disclose such massive areas being legally made out of the purview of people’s participation in planning, is inherent to SEZs. Because they are out of the purview of planning, because they are out of the purview of decision-making even to have those areas declared as SEZs. It is chance inspections under RTI that lead to such information about the SEZs being proposed. It was on examining the deeds executed, which were obtained under RTI, it became clear that SEZs were given post-facto approval after the deeds were executed.
Therefore, we can see the kind of governance and no transparency. The basic norms of democracy have been brazenly flouted. It is also double speak from a government that wants foreign companies to ‘Make in India’, while within the country SEZs are actually DESHI initiatives.
The Constitutional 73rd and 74th amendments that mandate people’s participation in planning processes is reduced to zero in the bargain. There is a Development Authority who holds the reins in these places. Sounds familiar? Yes, the National Waterways Authority Act, 2016, already took away six of Goa’s river stretches out of our purview for planning. The Major Port Authority Act, 2021, in the name of regulation and planning of major ports in India, has taken 53 km of Goa’s 160 km coastline out of bounds for involvement of local people in planning and powers being vested with the Mormugao Port Authority.
This means development will be top-down and Goa is becoming one huge SEZ zone where local people will be reduced to specimens in a zoo. It is all adding up to loss of voice. Goans opted to be a separate territory and non-merger into Maharashtra in the Opinion Poll of 1967.
Clearly, there was a massive mandate against merger with Maharashtra and for self-determination as an area that has distinctly come together culturally and politically. Can we let this moment of history be discarded, to subsume powers of self-determination even legally, leave alone what happens due to brazen flouting of laws?
The world over, it has been clearly established that people’s participation in planning keeps employment levels high, and land use democratic, because people have stakes in the use of the land, as against fly by night operators, who bid or seek to become the new colonisers.
In Goa, they come in the shape of Lodha, Bhutani and the like. The people have to continue to live in the place. They will opt for rapacious development, through which they will be eliminated, and their identity will be lost.
That is why Goa’s people have been demanding special status, and people’s economic zones (PEZ). This means people with their little small and medium enterprises have spaces to operate legally, rather than covertly because the non-SEZ areas do not have the benefit of facilities or single window access.
These could be whatever enterprises local people have the skills for or are being trained for. These would be the people’s economic zones where the process is so designed where both special/spatial/land use planning involves people.
This in turn calls for preparing an inventory of land uses and skills and projections based on training and educational opportunities for local people. In the absence of such inventory.
Having said this, knowing that governments have a penchant for converting anything into projects on which they can get a commission, this could very well be a project where consultants who have no clue about the social and cultural contours and languages of Goa, are given the project of making the inventory. This cannot be. It has to be locally driven so that it is also locally accountable. It is difficult to interrogate consultants and hold these consultants whose bonafides are often obscure.
The inventory must look at all kinds of uses, some of which may be created through the bio-diversity management committees, but not necessarily so because this is not clearly mandated as the agenda of biodiversity management committees.
In the absence of democratically conducted and accountable studies, we will keep on having SEZs and all of Goa will become one huge SEZ (with different names) before we even know it. The faster we register our strong disapproval, the better.
(Albertina Almeida is
a lawyer and human
rights activist)