Citizen Savio Dias drags govt to High Court to force it to do its job

Gets more ridiculous every day. Now the citizen has to go to the High Court to make the High Court force a government department to do a job it is paying itself handsomely to do. Savio Dias a citizen of Margao filed a Public Interest Writ petition when he had had it up to here with effluent water stagnating outside Osia, with the entrance to the SGPDA (South Goa Planning and Development Authority) market being blocked by fish vendors and fish trucks, and encroachment of vendors into public passage ways.

You would think that once the market is built and running the Municipality and other allied departments would see to it that the market ran smoothly as a matter of course. If you thought that you would be the biggest fool in creation. Because oh no, the government servants, from ministers to the lowliest peon are on a 365 day vacation in Goa.

Fed up with wading through filth, dodging past vendors sitting in the passage ways, Savio Dias approached the High Court and dragged the Chief Secretary and others in his plaint.

Rajesh Jagannath Naik, Member Secretary of SGPDA earnestly assured the Court that toilets would be cleaned regularly.

Sulabh International Social Organization is erecting Effluent Treatment Plant in the premises of the wholesale fish market. The Electricity Department will give the Plant an electric connnection. The government had hired the services of an "NGO" private contractor Green Goa Works to clean the wholesale fish market on 18 November 2010. What indeed was Green Goa Works doing for 15 months?

The fish vendors at wholesale fish market block the entrance of the complex since unloading of the fish is done at the market entrance. The retail fish market is encroached upon and waste dumped on the foothpath and in the passage ways. An Eflluent Treatment Plant is sorely required in the retail market too, said Dias to the Court. Water stagnates in front of Osia Shopping Mall and flows down to the South end of the Kadamba bus terminus, causing a nuisance and health hazard to commuters since it collects in a stagnant pool.

The SGPDA and the Margao Municipality have given an undertaking that they will take action against vendors encroachments in the walking areas as soon as Savio Dias makes a representation to the two authorities that seem to suffer from advanced and crippling blindness, deafness and a total lack of sensory perception. As soon as they received Dias' complaint WITH NECESSARY PROOF they will swing into action and do the job they we the people are paying them to do. They will do the job within two months.

Two months? For something they should have been enforcing since Day One?