The Accidental Activist - Map to the Future By Venita Coelho
The RP2021 is finally out. Every Panchayat ghar has a maps displayed on its walls - or it should have. So how do you make sense of these maps? Here's a lay persons guide. Firstly there should be three maps. One that shows your Taluka. A second that shows your Village with settlement areas marked. And a third that shows the same settlement areas but in different colours so that you can tell exactly when the land was converted into settlement - under a gazette change, in the last Regional Plan, during the Survey of '71 and so on. The second map is the one that you will first need to understand. Before you do that the key thing to understand is that this Regional Plan has converted no new land. Your map is meant to show you only the legal settlement areas that already exist in your village. Other than this only proposed Government projects are supposed to be on the map. Which is a good place to start checking. Some villages have discovered large new areas marked as settlement. On checking with Map 3 they have found that there has been no legal conversion. An official actually told one villager from Pilerne who had found one such irregularity - 'The ink must have run into that area'. Make sure no ink has run into any areas it shouldn't have in your village. The new idea that this RP2021 introduces are 'ECO1' and ECO2' zones. Eco1 means an ecologically sensitive zone that under no circumstances can be developed or built in. It is untouchable. Eco 2 means an ecologically sensitive zone in which permissions and conversions will be given only under strict controls. Check all your eco areas. On some maps areas have both an Eco1 coloration and a settlement colouration over that. Uh oh. Some areas however were legally marked settlement, and have only now been shifted to Eco 1 or 2. In these cases you can apply to the TCP to put on hold all building permissions within these areas. It would be a good idea to check that all your village resources have not been wrongly marked - water bodies have not been omitted, fields and cultivatable land is correctly shown etc. Slopes and orchard land are also important to check. It is crucial to check if Communidade land has been correctly shown. If your communidade maps are incomplete, then you can apply to the TCP under RTI for the relevant areas that their maps show as communidade property. It would be best to do an on the ground check. Go from vaddo to vaddo with the map, physically verifying that all is as it is shown. When you find what seems like irregularities, you first need to check with Map 3 whether these are legal conversions. You will also need sub division numbers to identify these discrepancies correctly. The Village Map provided does not show sub division numbers. You can apply to the Land Survey department for a map of your village with subdivisions at a scale of 1:5000. This scale matches the map that has been provided and will be easier to read. Along the way you will discover a lot of your neighbours guilty secrets. You will realise who has built without conversions. Who has carried out building violations. Who has built illegally. The drill for these sort of discrepancies is the same as it always has been. If you wish to take action, you need to write a complaint to the Panchayat and the TCP which they will follow up. But what you are on the trail of right now is not so much the small scale irregularities that happen regularly in a village, but rather large scale irregularities that might open the door for disastrous development. The maps have to be read along with the hard copy of the Regional Plan. One of the things to watch out for are proposed ten and fifteen meter roads. Firstly, such a road in a village invariably means that lots of people will lose their front gardens. Secondly, it could mean a large development is on the cards somewhere. Under the new DPR rules no development can get permission unless roads of this size are in place. What do you do when you find what looks like a problem to you? There are Taluka level Technical Committees set up to help you. Feel free to write in to them and the TCP for an explanation. They are there to help you and to explain the Regional Plan. An official explanation is always a helpful thing to have at hand. When you are sure you have a real violation at hand - get ready to battle it. All of the above cannot be done overnight. Though officials have repeatedly said that the deadline for feedback and objections can be shifted, it still firmly stays in place as 31st December. So villages need to write in officially asking for the deadline to be shifted. The plan is meant to decide the future of Goa for the next 13 years. Surely we can have a few more months to thoroughly study it. Next week we'll take a look at the questionnaire that the village is meant to fill up. (ENDS) ============================================================================== The above article appeared in the December 9, 2008 edition of the Herald, Goa
