Saving Goa from itself

All these years, we have spent Diwali at our house in Goa. The weather is nice: warm in the day; cool at night. In our little village, the only sounds we hear are the strains of Indian classical music from the temple close by. The sky is clear and starry, playing hide-and-seek with the swaying fronds of coconut trees. Forget climate control systems, we don’t even need the fans. And so it was that we arrived in our paradise in early November.

But wait a minute: the skies are hazy with ominous black clouds on the horizon; it is hot and humid. “It’s like May,” I tell my friend. It was his first time in long years and certainly a first for staying in a Goan home. Our place is not a second house; it is our home in Goa. We come here not just to take a break but to be part of this wondrous whirlpool, to be sucked willy-nilly into the vortex of civilised chaos and earthy culture.

As we wended our way home, we heard drum rolls in the sky: thunder, followed by a spectacular display of lightning. This weather continued for a couple of days and then it exploded into a cloudburst of rain amid the sound and light display. Awesome as it was, we felt an immediate threat: impaired driving and traffic snarls. Wonderful as Goa is, there are still the problems of an India that is becoming rapidly rich.

This is the problem in Goa: wealthy Indians are buying up properties as a second house. It is perhaps the most global enclave in India, not just because of tourism, but because the local ethos is civilised; at the law office of my friend Antonio Filipe Cordeiro one morning, I saw visitors wish the receptionist a hearty good morning. If you have such a civilised place on your doorstep, why look at England, France or Spain? Goa provides a wonderful alternative.

One of the offshoots of globalisation has been the huge increase in the wealth of people who run or own companies. For every Infosys or Wipro, there are hundreds of smaller firms that are riding high on the economic boom. They have generated enough resources for people to seek get-aways to greener pastures. At one time, not too long ago, it was travel; now it is setting up second houses, especially in Goa.

Trouble is, Goa is at the mercy of venal politicians, a sluggish bureaucracy, greedy and homesick NRIs and a wide variety of idealistic NGO naysayers who don’t understand change. Add to this a bunch of rapacious builders and developers and you have the recipe for a disaster. The complete lack of governance at the state level is balanced somewhat by the active communidades with their limited powers and susceptibility to ATM persuasion.

In the end, Goa suffers from a deficit of governance. After last week’s storm, the power grid collapsed, leaving much of the place in darkness for hours. The government-owned utility simply shut down its wobbly network, leaving us without power during the festival of lights. As you cross the bridge from Panjim, just across from the assembly building, an entire hillside collapsed onto the national highway during the monsoon, leaving a scar on a tableau that counts among the most picturesque in the state.
 
There are horror stories about the unseasonal storm as well as the ferocious monsoon. But the politicians are busy scheming; the bureaucrats slumbering and the activists, armchair and otherwise, railing against SEZs and mines; the one paper I read buried the weather story on its inside pages.

As an increasingly wealthy India puts pressure on this haven, the local regime, locked into its own internecine battles, is coming up spectacularly short of ideas and values to deal with it. Many people see it as a get-rich-quick opportunity; others see it in a muddle-headed way as a threat to nature and are treating it as a fight between good and evil. The government is clueless, pulled every which way by fixers and protesters; the resultant paralysis is taking its toll.

Email: rdesai@comma.in