PANJIM: Village Groups of Goa, sent out a call to all Goans ‘who care for Goa,’ to attend the public meeting called to demand the de-notification of the regional plan.
Pilerne Citizens Forum said that they were expecting ‘every Goan’ to come to Azad Maidan, Panjim on that day to show solidarity with the cause of de-notifiying the regional plan.“This plan has been conceived by a mafia of architects, builders and politicians. We reject it, so I ask all of you to come in huge numbers on December 16, at 2.30 pm,” President of PCF Prakash Bandodkar said.
Village groups led by Pilerne Citizens Forum, once again bombarded the regional plan calling it full of deliberate and gross violations.They quoted a letter written by Town Planner Edgar Ribeiro, in which Ribeiro called for a ‘serious restructuring of the plan by denotifying the notified plan and working upon it participatively.
Edgar went on to say that “this can be done in quick time as SLC on the flip side have generated an excellent plot level base map for the whole of Goa.”In his letter dated December addressed to the Chief Secretary of the State, Edgar has said that SLC has “overshot their brief” but more than that chose to target the government for declaring certain conditions as “non-negotiable” for SLC .“The draft RPG 21 despite being in the public domain, received a series of governments jolts, through: Keeping five major municipalities and one fast growing panchayat ( housing between them a third of Goa’s population) out of the RPG suggestions process; hurriedly amending the TCP Act via Section 16/ 16A, to keep out all government projects (on the anvil or as proposed) outside the purview of the TCP Act, amending the state act pertaining to health for ensuring a sectorally promoted to land and its usage outside the TCP Act; and incredible as it may seem, ensuring that RPG 2001 would continue as the anchor for building permits.
Edgar even defended the ‘non-official’ members of the SLC saying, “Non-official members of the SLC argued that a dented spatial plan was better than no plan at all, given governments penchant to use the hopelessly outdated RPG 2001 as its spring board.”
Advisor to PCF Yatish Naik once again reiterated that the only hope of salvaging the plan was through denotification. “You cannot change a notified plan, unless it is denotified. We want a 100% honest plan notified,” Naik said while he asked for SLC to be reconstituted with environmentalists, town planners and other people with “good knowledge of planning” to be part of the team.
Naik claimed they had the support of over 150 village groups and has vowed to unseat the current government out of power in the ensuing assembly elections.
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