8000 plus tons of the River Princess could be lying in the sea, despite the minister for tourism’s confirmation that the ship has been removed
A not so little accident of a fishing trawler where theRiver Princess stood for a decade and more, has revealed interesting secretslying on the sea bed. And some blatant lies too.
If the incident and other records unearthed by The Goan arepieced together, 8000 plus tons of steel of the ship is still at the bottomwhen we have been told by the tourism minister in the state assembly that theship (meaning everything in the ship) has been removed.
Well, not quite as Manjunath Narayan Harikant realised. OnAugust 17 at 9 am in broad daylight, the nets of a Vasco based fishing trawlerFrankey got entangled with alien material on the sea bed. Manjunath NarayanHarikant’s trawler with its’ five member crew almost capsized off the coast ofCandolim. “The seabed over there has no rocks and we were fishing for a hugecatch of prawns there. And with the River Princess gone we were expecting ahuge catch”, explains Harikant. Instead, the trawler’s net first got entangledand then cut by sharp objects below the sea. The trawler’s Rs 75,000 loss, dueto nets getting cut, is an indicator that huge sharp metallic objects lay underthe waves and on the seabed.
On July 19, Tourism Minister Dilip Parulekar had told MargaoMLA Digambar Kamat in the assembly that the removal of the vessel had beensuccessfully completed on May 18, though unverified. The Minister also toldPorvorim MLA Rohan Khaunte on August 2 that 11319 tons of steel was salvagedfrom the scrap. The scrap was sold by Arihant Ship Breakers, the contractors forthe removal of River Princess. Here too questions can be raised. The governmentvalued the scrap at Rs 14 crores as per rates existing in 2010, whereas thecurrent value, which Arhant will get, is almost Rs 30 crores. The governmenttherefore loses 16 crores that Arihant benefits from.
What is baffling however is that how did the Minister callthe removal ‘successful’ when the fishing trawlers nets got slashed by metallicstructures underwater. The removal of the vessel was neither verified nor its’underwater scan endorsed by experts,
“The fact that theship originally weighed 19300 odd tonnes and only 11319 tonnes have beensalvaged raises serious questions about whether it has been totally removed”explains renowned environmentalist and microbiologist Dr Joe D’Souza. DrD’Souza’s explanation is endorsed by the fact that in one of the previoustender documents for its salvage by Department of Tourism, the LDT or LightDisplacement Tonnage of the actual weight of the ship was mentioned as 19361metric tonnes. Whatever happened to the balance 8042 tons?
Candolim Beach Lifeguards confirm that whirlpool likeformation would develop over the site of the beached vessel during the currentmonsoon, a phenomenon never visible in the past.
But more findings will cause more whirlpools. Even after ithas supposedly gone, the stink of not just an environmental disaster but thesmell of administrative foul, play and corruption, is all pervasive.
