https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/extra-smart-city-shenanigans-for-panaji/articleshow/63649961.cms
‘Dhedd Xanno” is a piercing Konkani term that comes to mind every time a little bit more of the “Smart City” strategy and planning for Panjim is revealed. The tiny riverside capital of India’s smallest state commemorates its 175th year as the urban centrepiece of Goa in a shameful condition of disrepair, with the achievements of generations past literally crumbling to bits on the roadside. Meanwhile, incredibly large sums are now set to be squandered on egregious, totally unnecessary, site-inappropriate technology that ignores the most basic needs of city residents and visitors alike. Instead of improvements to quality of life, these extra-smart shenanigans will benefit no one other than the usual suspects in a small coterie of cronies. The cruel irony is that Panjim embodies smart city planning in its very DNA. It was the first rigorously planned and designed city in India in the colonial era, the very first to be laid out in a grid pattern with broad sidewalks on all streets. Its 19th century city fathers took ideas for drainage and sanitation from Europe, and made sure to create plazas and open spaces for the benefit of all residents. All this ensured a famously gracious quality of life that persisted all through the 20th century, but is now under considerable assault. Anyone familiar with the colonial-era photographs of low-rise flaneur-friendly Panjim cannot help being shocked and dismayed at the current state of the roads and pavements, where simply walking in a straight line is impossible and often hazardous. The feisty London-based activist Carmen Miranda grew up in Altinho overlooking Panjim in the 1950’s. Recently, she wrote on Facebook, “I knew a Panjim that viewed from my house in Altinho, looked like a coconut plantation, and where all the buildings and houses were below the hight of a coconut tree by law. The transformation since 1950s is huge, and not particularly nice...the holes, broken pavements, garbage, noise, chaotic traffic, entire pavements surrounded and blocked by motorbikes and cars. Panjim is decrepit, dilapidated, crowded and dirty. It does not have to be that way. Incompetence in the administration at all levels does not help this lovely city cope well with the overwhelming growth of population. Yes, there are still a few jewels surviving and reflecting our past history...but for how long? Miranda accurately nails down the most important issues facing the city, each of which could easily be solved given the political will. But matters like impassable pavements are not on the minds of so-called “Smart City” planners. Instead it is all big-budget electronics costing many millions of dollars. A city reeling from an onslaught of garbage piled up on the streets and thrown in the river is supposed to get a “technology-based solid waste management system” that would fit “every household in the city with QR codes” to feed data into an “integrated Command and Control Centre” where there will be “minimal human engagement.” The rather ludicrous end result of all this, we are told, is that the city will know whose garbage has been collected. Most absurd of all is another extra-smart plan to install at least 450 advanced digital cameras on Panjim’s lamp-posts (it’s doubtful there are even so many lamp-posts) fully equipped with facial and number-place recognition, in order to blanked one of the quietest and safest cities in the world with ridiculously inappropriate surveillance. This tender alone is estimated to rise above 250 crore rupees. Where is the need? Why does Panjim need even one of these military-grade cameras, let alone 450? How can the city justify such expenditure, while ignoring the elementary needs of its citizens? There are no answers here to satisfy anyone, let alone respect the constitutional rules of democratic engagement. Dhedd Xanno, indeed.