Is Panaji a great place to live?

Is your Panaji a great place to live is the question posters stuck on the walls of the city are posing to its residents. Panaji, the capital city, may just fit in the prescribed norms, parameters to qualify it as a city but frankly to the naked eyes it looks nothing more than an average town -- haggard and wasted like say old Delhi or old Hyderabad.   

The sons of the soil have no space left in the city -- figuratively speaking and literally too. They cannot even park their two wheeler on the city’s soil without paying the parking fee to the yellow shirts deputed to collect it on behalf of a private contractor who in turn has been contracted to undertake it on behalf of Corporation of City of Panaji (CCP). Well, when you park your vehicle in provided slot you pay fee to the CCP, if you don’t, policemen make you pay for parking it wrongly. So when you park your vehicle in the great city rule of thumb is that you’ve got to pay for parking. To whom depends on where you park it.   

Public parks provide intrinsic environment and aesthetic right in the heart of concrete jungle. It is a vegetative buffer and a place for families and friends to meet in the evenings. It provides a meeting point and space for physical activities to senior citizens in the evenings. City Corporation can have some recreational events to raise revenues but that needs to be done with a sense of responsibility, without causing ruckus or vitiating the environment.   

The CCP has been renting out the central park ‘Garcia de Orta’ to carry out commercial events, food festivals that are invariably accompanied by raucous and jarring music. Gas cylinders are brought inside the park to cook food. Reckless handling of the cylinders in the open can cause blasts endangering many lives. Alcoholic beverage is served in the open. Could it be that the park is also one among those places notified by the honorable tourism minister for drinking to boost tourism in the state? You can never figure it out these days, the way things stand.   

If there is a caretaker appointed for the park then it must be on the muster roll because you never see that person physically present in the park anytime. In the absence of supervision you will find beggars camping in one corner, drunkards having a joint in the other and streetwalkers soliciting business in yet another. The hapless middle class visitors have learnt to simply ignore and put up with these repulsive activities happening around them.   

When the big production houses arrive to shoot on location in the city, bouncers take on themselves the mantle of law enforcers and traffic managers and policemen are reduced to the role of bystanders. Bouncers working whether with Casinos or film units or for local events have been seen increasingly throwing their weight around in wanton disregard of the law enforcers.   

The movie units camp right near the monuments of the great city be it Old secretariat, Abe de Faria statue area or lawns of Maquinez palace. They prepare food and serve it to the unit members right there and then wash their utensils too. You inform the police headquarter about it and the staple reply you get is -- the unit has the necessary permission to shoot. If the monuments and the surroundings are soiled, defiled it is none of the police’s business to look into it, is the impression they give you.   

Now discussion about the city is never complete without reference to those that fired our imagination to dream it as the ‘smart city’. They have not been heard of or seen around in recent times. In the past they made known their presence by holding meeting to discuss issues facing this great city. They collected suggestions by installing boxes in the marquees erected at the road side for that purpose. Really do not know whatever happened to all those suggestions that were dropped in the boxes, because the façade of the city has been deteriorating rapidly. Where are the much awaited CCTV cameras that were promised in the streets? Most importantly what have they done with the resources provided for making the city look smart? How much of it has been really spent? and if spent, why the results are not visible on the ground? Who should be held accountable for failing to deliver on this initiative?   

Though the illustrations on the posters pasted in the town are of actual places and structures. Someone has painstakingly worked with Photoshop applications to make them look smart - right out of Walt Disneyland. For example the filthy interior of Panaji market belies the way the poster depicts it.   

Now here is minimum that can be done to commence the city’s journey toward greatness. Sweep the streets, collect and dispose garbage and plastic, drive away undesired elements loitering in the Park and Azad Maidan, Shift the Casino huts from the city promenade to elsewhere, tar the main roads of the city, deploy sufficient number of traffic police to regulate traffic and avoid congestions. The road right in front of CCP building is in dire need of repairs. So tar it first to make the CCP look smart in the first place. We would, any time, love to see our beloved Panaji as the great city but right now sadly it isn’t.