Goa and the making of Poverty
By Jason Keith Fernandes
The image of Goa Dourada, a golden Goa, under Portuguese colonial rule
belied a grim reality; a reality of crushing poverty and cereal shortage,
where agriculture could not sustain the population anymore. A population
at times subject to the cruel whimsies and depredations of its feudal
classes. Little wonder then, that its population migrated in droves when
the opportunity to migrate to British India and beyond opened up. In the
process they created the financial basis for much of the prosperity that we
commonly associate with Golden Goa.
Today in Goa we find ourselves in the thrall of another dazzling image,
that of Goa as the ideal state of the Union. A Goa which can offer the
perfect setting for a middle class lifestyle and standard of living, a Goa
whose time has arrived. It doesn't give me much pleasure to pop that
bubble, but I do feel obliged to play Jeremiah, the prophet of doom since
this image of Goa is perhaps no more tenable than that of the colonial
'Golden Goa'. The image is superficial at best and ignores the manner in
which poverty is being systematically created in Goa. A poverty that does
not rely on attracting out-of-staters, but is determined to create
home-grown versions.
I know that these are not merely the wild fantasies of a madman crying out
in the wilderness because it played out before my eyes in bizarre
starkness. Preparing for the inauguration of the Hi-Tech Park at the hands
of Sonia Gandhi, the stone rubble wall to a field on Taligao plateau was
broken down in three places. Where the local peasants had for years grown
ladies-finger, marigold, radish, tambdi bhaji and paddy, a road roller now
stood flattening the land. Before it, under the blazing sun stood labourers
destroying the little bunds of the fields, while in the swirling dust
kicked up by this work the peasants themselves scrambled to collect the few
dry stalks that remained in the fields they once cultivated. It could have
been a scene out of a movie on colonial India, because they did not know
what was happening and why. 'Why take the field to build a transformer?' a
toothless old man, dark from being burned in the sun asked me. If
helplessness in the face of governmental action needed a face, I found it
in the blankness of his face and in the face of the women who with some
amount of hopelessness pointed out that they had no other income but what
they got out of the field.
The field does not belong to them, they merely rent it every year, which is
why they apparently don't have a legal right to the livelihood it generates
for them. But isn't this the classic example of poverty? Where one does not
even own the land on which one works? In our haste to create the knowledge
economy in Goa, are we providing an alternative employment for these people
before we embark on creating more employment? These peasants of
Nagali-Taligao already lost their grazing lands on the hill, since an elite
residential locality now occupies most of it, now they loose the land on
which they draw the food that quiets the fire in their bellies. This marks
not just the making of unemployment but the creation for the basis of
desperate poverty. Goa's morality was outraged when it heard of the
situation in Saleli. The situation in Saleli made some sense since Saleli
does lie on the periphery of the Goa we most often focus on and obsess
with. But this outrage against the lowest in Goa's society is taking place
not in some far flung, difficult to access part of Goa, but at its very
heart. In Tiswadi, in Taligao, barely minutes from the Goa International
Centre.
Golden Goa was about every Goan also having his and her fish, curry and
rice. Rather than look at it as a glorious cultural statement I would urge
you to look at it as a cuisine forged in poverty. The only food available
to a person who had nothing was the food one could forage from around their
house. Rice from the fields that one cultivated, fish that one could get
free from the water bodies around the home and coconuts from the trees
around the home. What is happening in a very concrete manner in Nagali
Taligao is to remove from these Goans the fields which provide them their
meager sustenance, the ecological safety net that Golden Goa once provided.
Was it Gandhi who asked us to think of the face of the poorest man we saw
and evaluate our actions on the basis of what it would hold for that man? I
don't want to think of that man's face, for in his vacant and blank eyes, I
saw only certain erasure. When Sonia Gandhi inaugurates the Hi-Tech Park,
what will it mean for the peasants of Goa and those who are not already
middle class? A case of Control-Alt-Delete?
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The column above appeared in Gomantak Times dated 23rd February 2006.
Please send feedback to Jason at <jason_keith_fernandes at yahoo.co.in>
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