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Symposium on Pre-Primary & Primary School Education &
Primary School Students Chess Tournament
More information at:
http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2008-January/068222.html
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GOA’S CHAOTIC TRAFFIC
By Valmiki Faleiro
For once, I seem to agree with a view of the Goa government. Home Minister Ravi
Naik,
in reply to a Legislature Question this Jan 14, said Rs.29 lakhs was too much
to pay
Delhi-based ‘Capital Road Research Institute’ to study traffic bottlenecks in
Goa’s major
towns – Panjim, Margao, Mapusa, Vasco and Ponda.
Ravi’s Chief Minister and my friend, Digambar Kamat may recall that in 1985-87,
when
he was Margao Municipality’s Councillor and I its President, a traffic study of
Margao
was done spending not a single Naya Paisa. I just enlisted the help of Goa’s
own ‘PS
Pasricha,’ Gurudas Zuwarkar, of the Traffic Cell of Goa Police, and
enthusiastic civil
engineering students from the government-run Goa Engineering College at
Farmagudi.
The GEC students, under guidance of one of their Professors, did a marvellous
job.
They undertook traffic surveys at several congestion-prone points at various
times of the
day and came up with some eminently workable solutions, like the traffic isle
between
Aquem’s St. Sebastian Church and the Timblo mansion.
Dy. SP Zuwarkar came up with some excellent ideas. We reversed the dangerously
‘X’-
shaped traffic flow outside the Holy Spirit School, safely diverting
North-bound traffic via
the hoary Civil & Criminal Courts building. It was, in the circumstances, a
painful
decision, having to rearrange traffic flow by Margao’s old quarter and its
quaint heritage
houses. I had no choice – I couldn’t acquire and destroy old houses to build
suitable
ingress and egress roads to the euphemism called “Goa’s Commercial Capital.”
Back to the proposed traffic study in Goa’s towns. Everyone knows the prime
cause of
traffic bottlenecks, to need an independent study. It’s the blessed buses and
outdated
roads. The next time bus owners go on strike demanding a hike in fares, see how
smoothly – yes, despite the huge increase in volumes – traffic glides through
our arterial
roads.
In Margao, as elsewhere, buses crawl on roads when in town, stop wherever, halt
however long, and then begin a race with the predecessor or the pursuer bus
outside
town limits, killing people en route. The fundamental reason for this: bus
owners are
generally no more operators, just investors. They hire vehicles for a daily sum
to what an
alarmed US-returned Goanetter, a ‘Shuddh Goenkar,’ Rajan Parrikar, dubs
‘ghanttis.’
(Multi-lingual ‘ghatti’ bus conductors, BTW, are a product of necessity of the
times. If I
must believe friends who regularly commute to work by Goa’s public bus
transport, 85
percent of Goa’s public bus users are ‘ghattis.’)
Neither Digu nor Ravi can discipline these ‘ghatti’ drivers and conductors – so
long as
they will rely on petty bribes collected by traffic policemen to pay the
tributes to Delhi or
to themselves. Traffic police take daily bribes from every bus operating on
Goan roads.
The RTO had, and still has, some decent officers – names like Krishna L Naik
and Dilip
Nagvenkar come to mind. Why, the Chief Minister’s own cousin, Venkatesh P Kamat,
was an excellent Dy. Director of Transport, who practiced in that era what an
unnamed
police officer recently prescribed to discipline errant bus drivers of today: a
sound slap!
But, then, again, RTO officers also routinely milk bus owners at the time of
annual
vehicle fitness test, if not for their Minister’s next birthday party.
Ravi Naik is certainly competent to discipline the traffic chaos on Goa’s
roads. He is not
the Transport Minister, to be sure, but the Home Minister – who controls the
Goa Police.
He will have to begin with a Himalayan proposition: reign in, as best as he
can, the
greed pervading the department – and between his own 39 colleagues.
I moan another fact: Goa’s roads have turned a nightmare for its largest
segment of
users, pedestrians. And we talk of democracy! Try crossing a thoroughfare even
at a
zebra crossing (how many licenced Goan drivers, anyway, know the significance
of a
pedestrian crossing?)
Ravi, Madkaikar and Digu, reign in this traffic chaos, or take ‘Sanyas’ in the
Himalayas.
PS: I could never commiserate enough with the parents who lost their only son,
a lad
doing his SSC at Margao’s Loyola, to the greed of Goa’s bus owners, drivers and
conductors, in that tragic “accident” outside the PWD offices at Fatorda,
Margao, the
other day. In this case, though, the speeding bus driver, overtaking another
bus when he
lost control, was not a ‘ghantti’ but a ‘khaas Goenkar.’ 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 January 27, 2008 edition of the Herald, Goa
