Despondency is the official language in the mining belt of North GoaNavin Jha / The Goan ,Amona03 August 2013Pic Credit: Sagun Gawade
Notes from a tense North Goa: Domestic rumblings in the confines of the bedroom don’t always stay within its porous walls. They trickle out of the walls and the woodwork till they reach the village square. If these rumblings come from one home, they inspire gossip. When they flow from virtually every home and reach the public square in a cascade, they become a language of angst.As we travelled across North Goa we saw a society in turmoil. The streets were full, not of people out to sell or buy but of those who have come out to cry. It’s an image not visible in Panjim or Margao or on chock a block tourist filled weekends on the beaches. It’s an image which is not beamed back to comfortable Panjim, to homes, government or newspaper offices.We step back now. The people are on the floor. “Ami fondant podle. Paad-poddon soglle government-ache. Amkam konnacheruch vishvas na,” (we have been led to our graves. Damn the government; we can’t trust anyone anymore) said 30-year-old, Satyaprakash Parab.Parab is from Cudnem, the heart of Bicholim’s mining belt and it doesn’t take a soothsayer to figure that he is another dot on the map of one lakh families affected by the ban in some way or the other.In Marcel, in Cumbharjua, a group of people wait near a tea stall opposite the bus stand. We asked what is called a gentle icebreaker question. “How are you, is everything ok”. The retort was like a ton of falling bricks. “If we were ok, we would be working somewhere and not loitering in the market on a weekday.” In Bicholim, Amona and the stretch around it, the social calendar moves from Ganesh Chaturthi to Chaturthi. The mining ban had just been announced and neither the full impact nor the grim realization was felt then. The gloom will be in full bloom this year, as the monsoon recedes and the festival draws near.“Our Chaturthi has lost its charm,” said Prakash Dessai from Sankhalim.In every village there was a corner or a junction where everyone once converged. This is where there was a tea shop, a tiny eatery, perhaps a small tavern, a cycle repair shop, and in some places, truck workshops. They are all shut. But people still come there in anger and pain. It is this heat that will synge both. “What sort of government is this? During elections the leaders promise us the moon and once elected they are never seen,” said agitated Banastarim local and aluminum fabricator Umakant Naik.But it’s clear that the anger is turned at the government of the day because the closure happened in this regime. And every time a housewife steps out to buy groceries in this belt, it loses – at least for the moment, one voter.“We will soon be beggars in our own state. Almost all economic activity is stopped without thinking about its dependents,” said Pratmesh Chari, of Navelim, Sattari.Moving through these villages, the full sense of the Mood of Goa survey The Goan commissioned to Nielson (reported in the previous issue July 27) emerges. An angry mind does angry ratings. Across the parameters of performance, satisfaction on curbing corruption, delivery on promises, people of North Goa have given more negatives to the Parrikar government. Not all of this may hold or even be completely valid. But anger talks and that tilts surveys.When you turn away from any of the village squares and move back to Panjim, you wonder which is more isolated from reality – a government office in Panjim or a village square in Kudnem.
