INTERGENERATIONAL EQUITY: THE OLD AND THE NEW

 

The end of a calendar year often makes us reflect on the ‘old’ that we leave behind and the ‘new’ that we hope for. When most of the economic, social, and political problems that Goa faced last year, or even over the last few years, remain firmly in place, it makes little sense to hope for a better 2021. The pandemic, of course, gives us reasons to be even more pessimistic. We really do not know how 2021 will unfold, especially because the government everyday reinforces its spectacular inefficiency in handling the pandemic. It is for this reason that, rather than offering the usual clichés about a new calendar year, it might be better to reflect on some of the positive changes over the last six months.

 

I am referring especially to the massive participation of college students and other youth in environmental protests since, at least, June 2020. While youth have always participated in protests and agitations before, and have been as vocal and well-informed, this time around youth participation is marked by a clever social media savviness. Additionally, they believe in confronting their elected leaders directly, especially through social media, not kowtowing to them as if they were feudal lords. At the height of the pandemic, many college students started mobilizing public opinion on Whatsapp and Twitter. Soon, these mobilizations developed into letter-writing campaigns, as well as creating public awareness through hashtags (#savemollem), artworks, and Instagram stories.

 

The main issue in the recent participation of the youth in Goa is intergenerational equity. In other words, the future of Goa and young Goans. But there is a conceptual difference as the ‘future’ in the recent protests takes the environment as its basis, and not culture or politics. Intergenerational equity is rather an old concept in economics but one that has been gaining increasing traction in debates about the environment, especially climate change. Intergenerational equity here means that the environment is the basis of life, and any livelihood must be based on conserving and protecting the environment.

 

The demands are strikingly different from what one generally assumes would be made by the youth. The youth are simply asking the authorities to protect and conserve the environment, and not necessarily create economic opportunity—or development—so that more jobs are available in the future. The old ways of pacifying youth unrest through government jobs do not seem to be working these days because the demands are not about the economy but about the ecology.

 

There are some urgent reasons why the environment needs to be protected and conserved from predatory development. For one, as the pandemic has taught us, destroying forests will only lead to more diseases being released onto human habitation. Secondly, it is about having a place to call home, so that one can live and make a living by accessing basics like clean water, air, and food. Without ecology, as it is getting clearer to almost everyone, no employment, cultural life, or society is ever possible.

 

Today, we are concerned about our future because successive waves of development in Goa have destroyed the intergenerational equity for the Goan youth. Goa’s history of destructive development shows that those most affected by it are the youth from the subaltern classes. Take the example of the tourism industry. When the industry started booming from the 1980s, many young people in the coastal areas dropped out of schools. One can also think of the mining boom which, while creating deep scars on the environment in those regions, also left the people living there little or no facilities. An environmental crisis only deepens a preexisting social one.

 

The most important political change that environmental and intergeneration equity activism needs to deliver is rather in the social sphere. While the social media blitz has turned the tides against developmentalist policies, Goa is yet to create equitable stakeholders, the young and the old of all social background, within a vision of intergenerational equity. Intergenerational equity is throttled if there is no vision for how communities will interact and use the land in the future. To put it in another way, we are yet to create a vision where Goa’s rich ecology is preserved and handed over to the next generation irrespective of caste, creed, or religion.

 

The big question is this: Who will benefit from the Goan environment that we want to protect today? Because, over the years, resources that one generation can hand over to the next have been steadily depleting. There is less land, for instance, that a new generation of Goans can inherit, or even purchase, for the building boom fostered as development has taken it out of common Goans’ reach. Despite the so-called development that successive governments are proud of and constantly promote, more and more Goans are forced to migrate for decent jobs. Thus, it is not surprising that young Goans in their 20s and 30s find it better to opt for Portuguese citizenship. So, we need to protect the Goan environment to create a better and more cohesive Goan community.

 

The idea of intergenerational equity is rightly driving many to question the benefits of development for this and the next generations. The answers that the youth are giving us align with the destructive history of development in Goa: We don’t need more development! On a deeper reflection, the demands of the youth today are not really ‘new’ but by fulfilling it Goans can find better ways to regain the best aspects of the ‘old’ life they have lost through rampant development since the 1970s. That is what we need in the years to come.

‘AMKA NAKA’: IIT, COAL HUB, AND DEVELOPMENT

 

From Canacona to Sattari, the chorus is loud and clear: ‘Amka Naka.’ Goans once again in large numbers are saying no to ‘mega projects,’ be it an IIT (that was shifted from Canancona to Sanguem) in Sattari, or the expansion of the coal hub in Mormugao with the supplementary project of double-tracking the South-Western railway line. Underlying these vociferous protests is a rejection of an economic model, called ‘development,’ that destroys the livelihoods and landscape of Goans, and a political establishment that promotes such crony capitalist ventures. This development makes Goans and Goa disposable in the interest of (inter)national businesses.

 

Of course, this is not the first time that Goans have said no to such development. From the 1970s, the Goan economy began to change from one based on mining to one that diversified into tourism. Mining did not stop, of course, to the extent that mining and tourism became the joint ‘backbone’ of the Goan economy. The then MGP government, though not necessarily open to external capital, and which focused much of its energies on domestic agrarian reforms, nonetheless promoted tourism to boost the Goan economy. In both industries, particularly in the new tourism industry, conflicts over land control and ownership were rampant.

 

But, from the 1980s, the tourism industry was the chief site where these conflicts over land control and ownership were played out. It was an old conflict, no doubt, between the bhatcars and mundcars, but the difference now was that Goa was open to national and global capital. The fanfare around the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in New Delhi in 1983, with a retreat organized in Goa, is a watershed moment that ushered widespread urbanization and tourism-related conflicts in Goan coastal villages.

 

The takeover of land by the tourism industry was resisted right from the start. Back in 1983, it was widely reported that Goans were resisting. Josephine Lobo and Preciosa Menezes, then in their seventies, fought against the expansion plans of a starred resort in Candolim. While the fight predated the CHOGM event, the starred hotel in question seemed to use the opportunity provided by CHOGM, with the massive government investment and interest to ‘get things done’, to finally acquire some coconut orchards owned by the two septuagenarians mentioned above.

 

Things only got worse in the 1990s. The promotion of tourism required more starred hotels and more land, especially from the mundcars, who had become owners of small holdings thanks to the Bandodkarite land reforms of 1964. One could think of the well-known case of a Japanese retirement village that was opposed successfully, which also brought tourism’s links to land use to the fore. Simultaneously with the conflicts over land, there were deep-seated cultural changes that the coastal towns experienced. Studies and surveys that document these changes highlight how the school dropout rates increased by leaps and bounds in the 1990s.

 

In the 2000s, while tourism continued to grow unsustainably, the demand for iron ore increased due to the Beijing Olympics. The result was one of the wholesale destruction of the forested regions of Goa. The mining companies promoted local Goans to invest in trucks to transport the ore. The illegalities in the sector and the destructive extraction of the ore led to an investigation under Justice Shah. Mining thus came to a sudden halt due to the order of the Supreme Court. Those Goans who had invested in trucks were the ones who were severely affected, not to mention as well the agrarian communities in the mining belt whose fields were affected due to the waste from nearby mines.

 

But despite such obvious experience of how destructive the economy of Goa was, successive governments—be it Congress or BJP—pushed for a more significant share of tourism, and showed no interest or initiative to recover the dues of the illegally-extracted iron ores from the defaulting companies. At the very least, the political establishment could have tried to redeem themselves by formulating better economic policies in the wake of massive scandals and illegalities in these ‘backbone’ sectors. In other words, they could have thought about a better alternative and worked towards its realization through policymaking. Instead, we were given more mega projects in the form of IITs and coal hubs!

 

I have focused only on the major economic trends and the protests against them. There were other equally essential protests such as the Ramponnkar’s agitation against mechanized fishing, the bitter opposition to the Konkan Railway single track, or the movement against turning Goa into a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Nonetheless, it is clear that since the early 1970s—that is after Goa was made a part of the Indian Union—successive governments have pushed Goa and Goans to the brink of an economic and environmental crisis.

 

Since the 1970s (at least), Goa has been experiencing the fallout of ‘development.’ Such a model, with its emphasis on infrastructure and industry, was touted as a solution to global poverty, especially after WWII. In simpler terms, or the common parlance of election discourse in Goa, ‘development’ means roads, water supply, and other necessary services. But to understand what development truly means, one must look at the destruction of Goa’s man-made and natural infrastructure by the mining and tourism sectors. There is no better way of doing business in the ‘development’ model.

 

With all of us facing the ill-effects of COVID, this destructive economic model patronised by the political establishment is untenable. Hence, when localized protests assert that “Amka naka IIT,” or “Amka naka kollso,” they should also unanimously assert that “Amka naka development.”

 

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 5 November, 2020)

THIS CRISIS WAS FORETOLD

 

The current COVID-19 crisis and the financial unpreparedness of governments worldwide in dealing with it are a cautionary parable. In Goa, the situation is no different. If there is a difference, the situation here is undoubtedly worse than in other places.

Be it the global financial crisis of 2008 or the Corona crisis now, it is certain that the poorly-paid workers are the first and the most affected of the lot. Though performing the most essential tasks for society, such as cleaning, these workers are treated as dispensable. Nowhere was this more apparent, and willfully ignored, as in India. The daily-wage workers’ barefoot attempts to return to their villages due to the lockdown should have haunted the country’s collective conscience.

But it didn’t! And the reasons are not hard to guess. The centuries-old and fossilized attitudes born out of an essential high and low within the caste hierarchy has seen most people condemned to remain poor and socially inferior. Of course, there have been moments when the underclass has rebelled, but the casteist system has survived, one way or the other.

 

In Goa, we hardly hear about how the pandemic has affected daily wage workers. In the grand narratives of megaprojects, like marinas, IITs, and coal hubs, these are precisely the people who are willfully ignored. Moreover, the government and big businesses want the land that belongs to agrarian, fishing, and daily-wage earning communities. The pandemic has surely deepened the financial problems for this section of our society.

And it seems that the pandemic and the financial crisis is ripping through the lives of even those who are not exactly poor or socially inferior. Recently, we read that in a small state like Goa, about 200 small businesses have asked for their trade licenses to be canceled. It is not surprising, though understandable, why small businesses made such a move. They are simply unable to stay afloat.

Also not surprising (as well as not ironic) is that while small businesses shut due to a mismanaged crisis, big businesses are expanding as if we are not in the middle of a health and financial crisis. News is trickling in of a major corporation, believed to be close to the ruling party, is planning to expand into e-retail, telecommunications, agriculture, and education. Another corporation wants to increase the volume of coal transported through Goa for generating power.

The state appears to favor big corporations unjustly. Nowhere is this partisan attitude more glaringly obvious than with the mining companies. Ever since the Justice M. B. Shah Commission made the startling revelations that Goa’s illegal ore extraction was worth Rs. 35,000 crores, the government has been unwilling to hold accountable any of the companies involved. After about eight years from the first revelations, it is now reported that the state can at least recover about Rs 466 crores. It is a fraction of what was alleged in the Shah Commission report, but it appears that the state will once again drag its feet.

Today when small businesses are shutting down, and people are losing their jobs, the treasury could have enjoyed some fiscal stability from these 466 crores at the very least. The resulting benefits from this stability could have been passed onto the people of Goa. For instance, the recovered cash could have been easily used for medical equipment and life-saving drugs against COVID-19. But alas, all these measures are ‘could have beens.’

Before or after COVID-19, the state never ensured that the exchequer was in good health. There were repeated warnings that the Goan economy was hurtling towards a crisis. For instance, the tourism industry’s performance and management were sure signs of what was to come. The mismanagement of the shack allocations every year, the taxi operators’ issue, and a general environmental crisis that is tourism-related took Goa to the tipping point.

Since the 1980s, successive governments have ignored warnings and recommendations that the carrying capacity—the number of people a tourist destination can serve yearly without environmental and cultural damage—should not be exceeded. But the governments want to increase the number of people visiting Goa each year continuously. Even at the peak of COVID-19 infections, both in Goa and the rest of the country, the Goa government announced that it was opening the borders for Indian tourists—even if they traveled from the Corona hotspots—while Goa itself had zero cases.

The role of the government in averting any crisis, with or without a pandemic, is central. If governmental policies make no provisions to withstand shocks and crises, then the government fails in its duties towards its people. Merely promoting multi-crore projects is a sure indication that more disasters will happen in the future. We are living in one now!

If one considers the last two decades of financial crisis and mismanagement, one gets the eerie feeling that our current crisis was foretold. True that there are some things that the government cannot fix; a vaccine takes about 18 months to be safely administered to the people, for instance. But be it a vaccine or safeguarding jobs and the economy, the government needs to be held accountable for an utter lack of fiscal stability. While people are suffering a pandemic and a financial crisis, the government cannot start building new monuments, like a parliament building or a Governor’s residence. The government demonstrates its accountability by prioritizing its spending. For instance, now, it needs to spend on healthcare.

It isn’t doing it now, just like it didn’t do it then. So, a future and worse crisis is already foretold today, if the Government does not reverse these actions.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 7 October, 2020)