My good friend Thomas Pindelski, who lives a few miles up the highway, has a post up today on his site (see link below) that strikes me as having some relevance to Goa. To wit, the part describing the laying of a new road.
Our builders and contractors in Goa have been reluctant to adopt new technology. After all, ghati labour is very cheap and easily exploited (never mind that these same guys who exploit the poor migrants will then posture as digital humanitarians here when anyone brings up the burden they impose on Goa and on Goan resources). The usual excuse furnished is that advanced equipment is expensive. But this is a fallacy. Even a child knows that the amount of money spent on the scams of issuing and re-issuing tenders for sub-standard work year in and year out is huge when you add in the decades that it has been going on, staggering. The PWD is a monument to corruption. The plain truth is, mechanization will result not only in higher quality construction, but severely reduce the scamming of the taxpayer. And THAT is not to the advantage of the contractors, the PWD engineers, the bureaucracy and the ministers. If you cannot issue tenders every few months, how are you going to keep the cash flow going? Migrant labour can be drastically reduced through adoption of such technology but that means vote banks will be reduced as well. Here's Thomas's post - http://pindelski.org/Photography/2013/08/24/america-works/ r
