THE FACE OF ‘DEVELOPMENT’

What does ‘development’ mean to the common man? S/he generally expects that the state should provide infrastructure facilities like roads, bridges, hospitals, sports complexes, transport facilities, etc. But while asking for basic amenities is one thing, development is often used to suggest the urgent need of large-scale investments in various types of industries and projects like bridges, stadia, big hotels, etc. The latter – along with its inherent urgency – is often responsible for the destruction of communities and land. There is, therefore, a gap between what development supposedly seeks to achieve and what it eventually ends up doing.

While notions of development may have changed over the years, its core has been the same. Since the day of the establishment of the Indian state, development was linked to economic modernization. More recently this vision of ‘development’ has been augmented with plans for improved urbanization (‘Smart Cities’) and a move to increase the reach of the internet (‘Digital India’). In each of these cases the promotion of ‘development’ is seen as a solution to all, or if not, most of the problems that are faced by the society.

The tourism industry in Goa helps us to see the gap between the theoretical and practical aspects of development. Land and community resources were used in this development, ostensibly, for the betterment of the same land and community that provided the resources. However, this has not been the case with the way the tourism industry has developed. Considering the present situation of the tourism industry, and in view of the fact that the government commissioned a new Master Plan for tourism this year, re-visiting some older blueprints for tourism development such as the ‘Master Plan for Tourism Development in Goa, July 1987’ (MP 1987) that initiated the massive tourism development, leaves little doubt that we need to urgently re-think how community and land resources should be used.

According to MP 1987, the travel industry was growing rapidly and there was a need to catch up with it since Goa could not be “immune” to such a global economic trend. MP 1987 sought to promote tourism, but it had also noted the problems attendant with the tourism industry. It recognized that the “management of tourism is a very complex task. It makes enormous demands on the resources of the place, natural and man-made”. MP 1987 was not in favor of “sacrificing the quality of the local environment” to make quick profit. The destruction of the environment could also lead to the loss of the “cultural mooring” of the local society, the report had warned.

The authors of MP 1987 had also conducted a sample survey of the Calangute-Candolim beach belt, to get a sense of the problems that these areas faced. Even before the advent of large-scale development, the survey revealed a proliferation of unauthorized construction activity, with the commercial activity encroaching on the roads due to a lack of space. The lack of space was leading to traffic congestion. Shortage of drinking water, absence of garbage and sewage management, drug trafficking, prostitution, and high land prices were the other problems identified by MP 1987. The survey also found that tourism development had bred conflict between traditional occupations, like fishing and agriculture, and tourism-related activities. This resulted in social and economic imbalances in the village economy, the report added.

To avoid any adverse effects of tourism development, MP 1987 suggested that it was important to “arrive at a volume of tourism which will bring optimum benefit” to the local people and the national economy. However, the report had admitted, in earnest, that there were “no standards available” to determine the volume of tourists that Goa could handle. Perhaps this might very well be the case as one can observe a contradictory logic running through the report: there are recommendations made for the increase of infrastructure to accommodate the increasing influx of tourists despite the fact that MP 1987 recognized that the carrying capacity of a small place like Goa was limited.

Nearly thirty years later, the Government of Goa has commissioned another Master Plan for tourism. R. Benedito Ferrão recently wrote about this Master Plan and argued that while the Master Plan made suggestions about protecting the environment and involving local Goans, there was precious little said on how exactly to do this. Further, this most recent Master Plan envisaged the role of Goans as only service-providers, and not as stakeholders. This appears to be quite similar to the vision of the MP 1987. While the initial Master Plan was prepared by the government, the recent one was drawn by a MNC. If at all anything has changed it is the shift towards opening of the economy for corporate or private exploitation.

This should force us to recognize that the language and practice of development is marked by a one-way power relation wherein communities – often marginalized – have to bear most of the brunt. While at least the Master Plans of 1987 and 2016 made the effort (or is it pretence?) of involving Goans to benefit from tourism development, other instances such as the often violent and cunning manner in which communities are dispossessed of their lands – in Tiracol, Betul, Loliem, and Mopa – shows us the blatantly brute power of actual ‘development’, as opposed to the subtle variants of the tourism Master Plans.

Rather than the emphasis on development, the importance and utility of public amenities, such as roads, bridges, hospitals for community use, need to be highlighted. The ambiguous language and practice of development needs to be replaced with a concrete vision that keeps marginalized communities and the environment safe.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 23 November, 2016)

TROUBLED TIMES AND THE LIBERATION BUGLE

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading with much interest a few letters addressed to the editor of O Heraldo. These letters, in one way or the other, argued for the necessity of ‘liberation’ for Goa. While Victor Ferrao, the Dean of the Rachol Seminary sought a “second liberation”, others rather felt that Goa needed a proper or true liberation. These letters were sparked off, as one may remember, by the highly objectionable statements made in the press by some freedom fighters, calling for punitive action against Goans who have registered their births in Portugal.

Calls for liberation coming in the wake of such statements by the freedom-fighters (FFs) can tell us a few things about Goan politics. To begin with, we need to understand that the FFs have an authority and legitimacy in Goan politics that is generally not questioned. Their role in the anti-colonial movement against the Portuguese Estado da Índia (EI) is what gives them this legitimacy, to such an extent that they have come to epitomize freedom from colonialism. Thus, when Ferrao asserted that there were “several un-freedoms” that the FFs refused to acknowledge – and thereby also played on the word ‘freedom’ in FFs – it enabled us to see the regressive role that some of these FFs play in contemporary Goa.

The letters addressed the sorry state of Goan politics and the manner in which the State in Goa had mismanaged governance and public resources. It is in this context that one needs to see the calls for liberation being pitted against the image of the FFs. Contemporary calls for liberation are a challenge, I argue, to a nationalist understanding of Goa and its history.

Liberation in the Goan context is used to describe the departure of the EI after the military annexation of Goa to the Indian Union. Thus, Goa and its people were understood to have been freed from foreign dominance, and also to have arrived at a culmination of history with their integration into the Indian nation-state. The FFs have, or claim to have, actively contributed to this integration. Thus according to the nationalist version of history, liberation as a project, or as a movement in history, is understood to be complete, with no necessity for further work or improvement. The departure of the Portuguese, coupled with the arrival of the Indians, was equated with the liberation of Goans. And yet we see renewed calls for liberation.

What we need to recognize is that anti-colonial movements that led to the formation of many nation-states across the colonized world also came as a promise for progress and modernization, apart from mobilizing to overthrow foreign yoke. The colonial state could not ensure the progress and betterment of the people because it oppressed and enslaved people. The colonial state denied rights to people in their own land. It also obstructed the cultural efflorescence of the people, and imposed Western culture on them. Such a position was articulated by TB Cunha, noted for his contributions to Goa’s anti-colonial movement.

However, progress and betterment is precisely what the nation-state that emerged from anti-colonial movements have failed to give to the masses. Even if the nation-state has been able to bring about modernization it has been at the expense of the lives and livelihoods of the marginalized masses. We have recently seen this in the manner in which land is sought or is grabbed in Tirakol, Mopa, Vanxim, Betul, and elsewhere across Goa, the brutal police action on peaceful protesters, unending scams that deplete the State exchequer or public money by many thousands of crores, and the mammoth mismanagement of public resources and properties.

Thus, to many it does feel like, rather than having the freedom to live and earn a decent livelihood, one is still colonized by the nation-state and its partners in the name of development. In such a contemporary scenario, the presence of FFs who hark back and depend on a legacy that is constantly failing us in the present is rendered meaningless. What is the point of having FFs if we do not have freedom? This is why calls for liberation today make more sense than celebrating some (imagined) national glories.

Which is also why calls for liberation should also be seen along with another more famous (or notorious) movement called ‘Liberation Theology’. In this context, liberation is cast as an emancipatory project. Begun as a movement within the Church in Latin America after Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez published his seminal text A Theology of Liberation (1971), ‘liberation theology’ sought to address the poverty-stricken lives of many in Latin America due to an unjust social system, and rampant capitalist development. The poverty in Latin America made the Church there face a crisis of its own relevance in that society. Fr. Gutiérrez argued that such a moment was precisely the time that the Church had to change by putting the poor and the oppressed first and actively supporting their struggles – the poor after all were at the center of the Christian message.

Listening to calls of liberation coming from various quarters one could argue that the State as well as the Church in Goa needs to put the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed at the center of politics and planning. The State more so as in a secular, liberal democracy the welfare of the citizens is entrusted to the State. With the State opening the doors to rampant development, the common masses and the marginalized will be further pushed in the corner and the calls for liberation will only grow. 

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 6 July, 2016)