Panjim Abased: The Degradation of Goa's Capital (Times of India, 3/12/2018)
V M
Just over a fortnight ago, the pioneering advertising powerhouse (and well-known theatre personality) Alyque Padamsee died at 90. There was a time when his catchphrases and signature images ruled the popular imagination: MRF muscle man, the Liril girl, Kamasutra’s couple and Hamara Bajaj. Less known was his sly rebranding of one part of his native city, when the go-getting “Mad Man of Mumbai” started to refer to the former mill lands sprawling across Lower Parel as much more snooty-sounding “Upper Worli”. Today that neologism is big business, with billions in real estate transactions cashing in on the invented cachet.
Some perverted version of that adroit contrivance is on display in the absurdly fanciful property developments on the Kadamba Plateau, alongside the new highway connecting Ponda and Old Goa to crossroads outside the capital. According to one project’s website, “with a more orderly approach to development and infrastructure, New Panjim or Upper Panjim boasts of better roads and connectivity. This has also earned it a new tag of ‘Upper Panjim’, a play on it’s [sic] affluential appeal although prices are yet to reach maddening levels, [sic] Panjim has seen. While still a part of Goa’s urban development, ‘Upper Panjim’ has the old relaxed ‘feel‘ that Panjim was once famous for.”
There’s so much criminally wrong in this hodgepodge of nonsense and outright fakery, from the outright misrepresentations and smears about Panjim to the utterly fraudulent claims about “affluential appeal.” In fact, only suckers will buy here. These hideously ugly developments are built on an arid plateau, without municipal water supply, and absent any of the civic amenities that define civilized urban existence everywhere in the world. No responsible state administration would have allowed permission to build in the first place, let alone so parasitically close to the magnificent UNESCO-listed world heritage sites at Old Goa. But here they are, making a mockery of planning and governance in India’s smallest state.
What happened to Lower Parel – and to characterful neighborhoods and towns all over the world from Brooklyn to Bali – falls into the category of gentrification. Long understood to function as a double edged sword, this process was usefully described by American scholar Emily Chong in the Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law & Policy, “Some argue that gentrification is beneficial since [it] creates more development, rapid economic investment, and support of projects related to consumption and entertainment. The incoming population of more affluent residents and people of privilege is directly connected to an increase in resource allocation…the gentrification process becomes detrimental when it forces original residents to leave the neighbourhood through exponentially increasing property prices, coercion or buyouts.”
Many of Goa’s most lovely villages reel under an onslaught of money pressure, mainly from newly rich Indians fleeing their home cities and states because of the deadly cocktail of pollution, intolerance, and wholescale civic collapse. That’s a kind of gentrification at work, with all its complicated losses and gains. But what’s happening on the Kadamba Plateau is infinitely worse, without any redeeming characteristics whatsoever. It is nothing less that wholescale fraud on the part of developers, combined with total wilful negligence of oversight by the state. While real estate in Goa has increasingly been riddled with cheating, this is wall-to-wall scam, with zero benefit to state or citizens. Now, on top of the litany of lies and broken promises, this pathetic charade about Upper Panjim.
175 long years ago, the ancient trading port inherited by the Estado da India upriver on the Mandovi was unexpectedly supplanted at the heart of the vast maritime empire from Mozambique to Macau. The rise of ‘Nova Goa’ signified something entirely new in history, the self-confident assertions of native elites wresting control of their own destinies even during the colonial era. Those city fathers studied the world, and made this most Goan city their civilizational statement. Even today, it is irresistible. Everyone loves it. Shame on those who implicate Panjim in their tawdry con games.