GOA SWAYS … UNDER DAYLIGHT TRICKSTERS By Valmiki Faleiro Like the coconut trees that line her coast, Goa sways. Let me illustrate with a few instances. PWD Minister Churchill Alemao has all the money in the world to add three to the existing two road bridges across the Sal – some within two kms. of each other! But no money to repair pot-holed roads. His brother Joaquim, the Urban Development Minister, has millions to splurge on ‘high- tech’ road sweepers, compactors and in-vessel garbage treatment, none of which can work in Goa. But not a few thousands to spare on new brooms, baskets and dustbins for the municipalities. Vishwajeet Rane, Health Minister, is a master at conceiving PPP (in theory, Public- Private Participation, in reality Public, for Private Profit) projects. He’s PPP-ing parts of the GMC and public health care. He has privatised public ambulance services, equipped with defibrillors, ventilators and oxygen – to carry patients to government hospitals that lack staff, beds and linen, forget life-saving medicines! Symptomatic of Goa’s governance. The flavour of the times is big – big budgets, big tenders, big spending. Or big bucks, by way of underhand percentage commissions. Nobody wants to waste time over spending small change on maintenance, like filling up potholes, buying brooms, or providing more hospital beds with clean linen. See how ministers, once inducted, squabble over departments with big budgets. They get to spend more and thereby pocket more. Don’t dare ask how they spend public money. So long as it is spent – and bigger the tranches, the better – it does their trick. Priorities are passé. If you ask why dozens of private security guards have been hired at public hospitals when there is a pathetic shortage of medical, nursing and other staff, or if you ask why hundreds of crores are spent on building irrigation canals to areas where agriculture is long dead, your sanity will be doubted. There is no time for planning, for drawing priorities and spending wisely. Quite literally, no time, the money must be spent today, for tomorrow may never come. Governments may not survive until the morrow’s dawn. Midnight coups, unstable governments, and overall uncertainties heighten the urgency to spend as quickly as possible. It is not as though the Health Minister can’t figure out that instead of spending a bomb outsourcing Goa’s public ambulance services to Hyderabad’s ‘Emergency Management and Research Institute’ (an affiliate, incidentally, of the now disgraced Ramalinga Raju’s Satyam group), he could have provided the same praiseworthy service departmentally at a fraction of the cost. It is also pointless asking that if the only job of ministers is to merely privatise public services and broker deals, then why need a government. We have reached well beyond that line of rationality. A dozen mammoth SEZs in tiny Goa, half a dozen riverine casinos ‘trickishly’ termed ‘off-shore’ (with another half dozen waiting in the wings), dozens of biggie builders from metro India to ‘develop’ Goa… That is ‘development.’ That is governance. Governance reduced to brokering private deals. A government that has long since forgotten that its basic duty lies in the public domain, not selling government privileges and duties, left, right and centre. This is Goa. Thanks to us, Goemkars. You and I, who repeatedly vote and elect these honourables. To represent us and to spend our money. It is not the ministers who need to learn. They know more than you and me. They know better than us what money power is all about. It is us, the people, who’re yet to learn the A, B, Cs… PS: The EMRI dial-108 emergency ambulance service is supposed to have life-saving para medical staff on its 18 ambulances operating in Goa. 37-year old Sanjeev Aikar worked as driver of one of the ambulances. When waiting on duty at an ambulance post, poor Sanjeev suffered a heart attack. He died before he could be rushed to hospital. At least three other people died recently … in each case, the ambulance allegedly arrived hours late. (ENDS.) The Valmiki Faleiro weekly column at: http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=330 ============================================================================== The above article appeared in the March 15, 2009 edition of the Herald, Goa
