Goans and human development-I

Fr. Victor Ferrao

Today we have several indices that enable us to calculate human development in our society. Goa is regarded as the best and the fastest developing small states in our country. But still we have many reasons to be concerned as the so-called development continues to leave several Goans (if not all) behind as it marches ahead in triumph on our soil. 

This means development becomes underdevelopment for some. We may trace several pointers that may indicate that we have great room for human development. 

One indicator that might ring several alarm bells is the lack of longevity of life among Goan males. Human development indices are centred on the access to health, education, employment, shelter and dignified life. This aligns with the capability approach to human development. We can identify a big yawning gap as regards the actualisation of several of development goals among our people. 

Besides, individual slothfulness, we have to regard that we are living in a largely unequal society. 

The gap between the developmental indices is growing by the day pushing down the quality of human life of several Goans. 

This might be among other reasons the main one for thousands of Goans deserting Goa and moving to what they consider greener pastures outside our country. 

 Maybe we have to raise the Kantian conditions and limits of possibility for this unequal development that we have in our society. This is a way of doing history of the present. It begins where we are. 

We have arrived here due to the conditions and limits of possibilities that played their course to let are arrive to the present. Our capacity to pursue development is therefore constituted by the limits and conditions of possibilities embedded in our society in Goa. 

The earlier work of Michel Foucault might assist us to understand how our past conditions the limits and possibilities that enable our chain of choices which led to point where we are now. Seeds of our present and future are in past. We Indians call it the law of karma. 

We are indeed agents of our lives. But our freedom is not absolute but is both constrained and enabled the conditions of limits and possibilities embedded in our society. Foucault calls this method of inquiry genealogical approach. It can open to us different complex pathways that have led to the actualisation of the present. 

Though we are situated in time, we are not fixated and are able to direct it with freedom within the conditions of limits and possibilities to construct possible futures for us.  

 This means we have to come to terms with the conditions of limits and possibilities that afflict and enable us. Several of these enabling and disabling conditions have their roots in the colonisation. 

Some may trace them also in the humiliations felt by the weaker castes and some kind of narcissistic triumph felt by the stronger castes in the far distant past. The institution of caste is also enabling and disabling condition for human development. 

Colonisation is associated with the pain of conversion and consequent sense of loss that afflicts several of our Hindu brethren today. Both colonisation and the institution of caste complexly condition and dispose us to generate pathways that have brought us where we are today. 

These pathways are led to the ordering of things in the economics, social, religious and cultural realm that have been interplayed by us as we exchanged cultural capital to reach the point where we are today. 

Today we all are running a race with unequal starting points. We are experiencing the hard truth that Rousseau taught us when he said ‘man is born free but is in chains everywhere’. 

 We are destined to reproduce unequal human development unless we bring about both collective and individual changes to counter the preconditions that fire it all the way. This would mean among other things, we have to deal with the afterlife of colonization as well as consequences of the institution of the caste system. 

Factors spiralling from the above two along with other similar ones have ordered our way to this point. We are shaped as well as we have shaped our way to this point. While doing the history of the present, we may discover other important factors that cumulatively order our way to this point. 

Our human development pursuits leave a lot to be desired. We can still put back the clock to start again from where we are. 

But it would require a tremendous leap of consciousness which is not easy. We have to re-order the pre-conditions of possibilities. 

This re-ordering will open new horizons of emancipative Goaninising that would promote human development democratically to  Goans otherwise we might commit a societal suicide with the disappearance of authentic Goan from the face of Goa.  

This is why we may have re-echo 

our own edited version of the clarion call of Karl Marx: ‘Goans of the world unite, you have nothing to lose only your chains’.