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Panaji, Goa, September 2-5, 2007 - http://www.indologygoa.in
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GOAN MINEOWNERS
By Valmiki Faleiro
Last week’s meet in Goa of the ‘Federation of Indian Mineral Industries’
reminded me of
our own celebrated gentry. Goa’s mineowners were always the holy cows of her
tiny
industrial base. Pre-1961, they were pampered by the colonial administration,
for help in
an UN-held plebiscite in Goa, possible in the reckoning only of Salazar’s
foreign policy.
Post-‘61, they were the only ones in India allowed to export ores -- the more
lucrative
part of the business, compared to production -- in a nation overrun by
socialism.
Elsewhere, mineral exports were canalized via the Government-owned MMTC.
The exalted position of Goa’s mineowners might be slightly rivaled today, as
politics
turned into a business and some politicians almost as rich and powerful as
mineowners.
At least one mineowner has now tried his hand at politics. They had done that
in 1963,
for the first time, when members of some leading mining families tried their
luck -- as it
turned out, unsuccessfully -- on the Congress Party ticket. A brother mineowner
became
Chief Minister and ruled for a decade, albeit under another party.
Mineowners need not have bothered about politics and governance: they were
powerful
enough to make or break governments. They need not have relied on politics to
mould
Goan society into whatever shape they fancied: they owned the tools to do that
--
schools, colleges, jobs, newspapers, and the money. But, apparently, not the
foresight
and intelligence. How then did these modern day princes come about?
It is said that no business ever made it real big in India without the
patronage of the
powers-that-be, save the Tatas. As seen, our Goan heroes always had State
patronage
on their side. And some streaks of luck and guile. Let’s take two instances.
First the case
of luck, then the other.
Early last century, a man of modest means, sat at his wooden stall below ‘Cine
Olympia,’
rolling beedies. The cinema, on the upper storey of Sunshine Building along
Jose Inacio
de Loyola Road, was Margao’s historic first. Across the road, where today’s
Govind Poy
hardware store and adjoining shops are, was the barrack where the cinema’s
patrons
parked their horse carriages, horses and bicycles.
At his humble stall, the man sold, besides beedies, cigarettes, tobacco and
stuff like that,
tickets of the Goa lottery. Sometimes, tickets remained unsold and were a loss
to him.
The jackpot, in that era, was a fortune of several thousand Rupees. One bright
day, the
man discovered that an unsold ticket had cracked the first prize. He had barely
banked
the money when, at the very next draw, his rare streak of luck did an encore.
He put the
entire amount into mining concessions. The business he founded turned out among
the
better-known mining houses of Goa.
The second case is of this beedi-smoking idler. A young man, all he did was
hunt, and
by virtue of that passion, knew Goa’s forests well. At his enterprising
mother’s initiative,
he landed a job with a mineowner. The latter, at that point of time, had hired
a team of
foreign geologists to prospect ore deposits in Goa. Since this involved work in
forested
areas, our hero -- who by then had also roped in a brainy friend -- was
detailed by the
employer to escort the visiting experts. The team finished its work, submitted
a report,
and departed. Our man was redeployed on the mines as supervisor.
At the end of that season, the mineowner was left with substantial produce,
stacked near
a river loading jetty in South Goa. Prematurely inclement weather forbade its
shipping to
Japan. Our beedi-smoking hero and his brainy friend, meanwhile, had other
plans. They
laid claim to the employer’s ore, taking advantage of an anomaly in the title
to the land
on which it was stacked, and got a favourable order from the Court where the
dispute
had landed.
Our hero sold the ore to an exporter and, with the money, quickly purchased the
land he
had heard the foreign prospectors say contained very high quality ore. Almost
overnight,
as it were, the beedi-smoking one-time idler not only turned into a mineowner
but also
owned what became one of Goa’s highest-grade yielding iron ore mines.
That’s how some of our mineowners -- the richest single group of people in Goa
-- were
made. Sure, they took risks and slogged. But, had they been any more
intelligent and
foresighted, Goa would be a different place, one way or the other. With their
kind of
resources, they could have either enslaved or empowered Goans far more
formidably
than they would imagine. (ENDS)
The Valmiki Faleiro weekly column at:
http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=330
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The above article appeared in the September 2, 2007 edition of the Herald, Goa
