Tyranny of Mega-Housing Projects Today, November 25, is the 499th. anniversary of the liberation of Goa by Afonso de Albuquerque. 491 years of the Portuguese presence have given Goa a distinctive ambience and elegance which the non-Goans both in India and abroad have recently discovered through the new communication links, the Konkan Railway with nodal points in various parts of India, and through the charter flights from Europe including Russia, and predators are at work to grab whatever land is available through their political proxies in Goa. In disgust - with no means to remedy the situation - Goans are emigrating in large numbers. A BBC TV presentation on the British town of Swindon some 10 days ago showed the large population of immigrants there, mainly from Poland and from Goa with the help of Portuguese passports. Several interviewed Goans stated that they may visit Goa but they will never return to Goa for good. On the other hand many Poles have returned to their country in the wake of the economic recession in the West.
Portuguese developmental projects worked around the socio-economic and eco systems without hampering or destroying them. Indian developmental projects eat into these systems and desecrate and destroy them, e.g., a creek which provided navigation upto the Mapuça Church but which, some two decades ago, has been blocked at Moira with a landfill to support the Mapuça bypass road. When the Mapuça-Moira road was constructed in the Portuguese period years ago a high-enough sturdy steel girder bridge was built over the same creek to allow for navigation when the road traffic between Mapuça and Moira was just a small fraction of that over the bypass landfill today. Instead of this ghastly landfill with concrete pipes why could a bridge not have been built to respect the creek traffic which served Mapuça and its environs? And who knows how many such projects there are which contribute to the demise of our beautiful environment in Goa? John Menezes, Mumbai, India.
