The ongoing monsoon has once again wreaked havoc on the bunds protecting Goa’s khazan lands and agricultural fields from the ingress of saline water. On Saturday, reports from Shiroda emerged of yet another breach in the bund causing the fields to be flooded with river water endangering the growing paddy crop.
The news comes even as the Goa Legislative Assembly is inundated with complaints from the ruling and opposition bench that bunds breached years ago are yet to be repaired, and compensation for farmers takes years to arrive.
In truth, the breaching of bunds is not new. Traditionally built mainly using clay silt and dried straw to hold it together, the bunds were repaired regularly year after year either by the comunidade or the land owner be it a temple or a bhatkar. However, with the enforcement of the Land Tenancy Act, and the ownership of lands being transferred to the tenants, the government set up a system in which tenants' associations would have to come together and approach the government for funds to repair these bunds or repair it themselves and seek compensation from the government.
They were to submit proposals for the repair of the embankments and would be given up to 90% subsidy for the same. However, the tenant associations were either not united or were not in a position to even bear the cost of 10% of the repair work. Unfortunately, as tenant associations withered and fields remained fallow, the system began to fail, setting in motion a turn of events that caused even more farmers to give up farming.
If not protected, the seawater will rush in right up to the edge of the village habitation and could threaten to turn the groundwater salty, as well as extend the width of Goa’s estuaries and take the river banks well within the villages of Goa. The restoration work needs to be done irrespective of whether the owners wish to revive agriculture or not.
Complaints of disrepair of bunds have been made in previous sessions of the Goa Legislative Assembly and promises have been made time after time to both repair the bunds as well as to compensate farmers in a timely manner. However, the agriculture department has admitted the scale of the task and in a bid to remedy the loss the state agriculture department has now proposed a Rs 350 crore project to save the fertile agricultural lands from loss to the sea. A proposal in this regard has been sent to the Union government and is awaiting approval.
It has been awaiting approval for the last three years with no update from the Centre as to when and if the funds will be released. Instead, Goa has received successive tranches of funds from the centre for building even more and even bigger highways many of which are developing cracks and potholes causing worries for the common commuters.
If the Centre can sanction thousands of crores for Goa’s highways, surely they would have some money to spare for repairing the bunds which cost only a fraction of the cost of the highways. It is only a question of priorities. The question is, does the state government have the will to pursue it? Chief Minister Pramod Sawant spoke of tourism at the recent NITI Aayog meeting in Delhi, but not a word was spoken on the need to salvage Goa's crumbling bunds.
Empty promises won’t save Goa’s agriculture and khazans.
