Whenever the Town and Country Planning Department issues a notification, antennas go up. This department is always treated with suspicion. Its schemes raise scepticism.
Its plans are seen as vehicles for vested interests. Its decisions are viewed as some sinister plot to garner kickbacks.
There are reasons for this. For decades Goa has had an uneasy relationship with buildings. The sight of a building is generally greeted with a pathological fear that beautiful Goa is being destroyed.
There is also a deep-seated fear that Goa’s agricultural land is being diverted towards construction. And a finger is pointed at the TCP department as being part of the problem.
Hence, when the Town and Country Planning Department came up with a plan last September to make space for golf courses, film cities and farmhouses, alarm bells started ringing. So loud was the din that the notification was withdrawn.
About a week back it was reintroduced, albeit with some changes. Golf courses and film cities were removed from the list and the norms for farmhouses were tweaked. Sports complexes were added, which means a golf course can still come up because golf is a sport after all. Yoga centres and religious centres will also be allowed.
One of the norms is that all these structures will not be permitted on land used to grow paddy. Why this obsession with paddy? Paddy is a water-guzzling crop and nearly 5,000 litres are required to grow 1 kg of rice.
Over 35 years ago, a central government report on crop diversification recommended that 20 per cent of the land in Punjab under paddy and wheat cultivation should be shifted to other crops to reduce water consumption.
So perhaps, growing less paddy and more of the other crops might be more sustainable and would result in the conservation of a lot of fresh water.
In Goa, land under paddy cultivation has been decreasing and construction is not the reason. It is just that paddy is not a cash crop.
Between 2017 and 2021, the land under paddy cultivation dropped from 50,302 hectares to 41,970 hectares, that is, roughly 8,332 hectares. In about the same period, around 710 hectares were converted for construction purposes, which means roughly 7,622 hectares are lying fallow.
It would be fair to say that this is a problem for the Agriculture Department, not the TCP Department. This also shows that our obsession with paddy cultivation needs a rethink. And the question of what to do with the land that is lying fallow also needs some deliberation.
On the other hand, land under cultivation of horticulture crops has nearly doubled, which means there is more money there. Allowing this land to be used for all the construction activity mentioned above would kill profitable agriculture/horticulture ventures.
In that sense, the TCP approach of protecting only paddy cultivation shows that the norms for construction are based on emotion and not hard data.
It would have been better if the agriculture and TCP departments had worked in tandem before the notification was issued. No one is saying that land under paddy cultivation should be diverted for construction.
The point is that land under horticultural crops like cashew, areca nut, pepper, bananas, mangoes, etc should also be protected.
