The BRICS summit comes to Goa amid protests against mobile towers and felled trees

As Goa gets ready to host the two-day BRICS summit from October 15, residents of areas surrounding the venues have risen in protest against the invasion of space and loss of livelihood that they allege the event has brought upon them.

The protests are not new. They began a few months ago when telecom companies started to build 102 mobile towers in South Goato increase cell-phone connectivity for the summit – a meeting of representatives of the five states that make up the bloc, namely Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Villagers objected to the towers being placed permanently close to houses and on government and private land. Panchayat bodies backed them and passed resolutions recommending that the towers be mounted on vans instead to tackle the immediate needs of the summit.

“If their only aim is to provide connectivity during BRICS, why do they not use towers mounted on trucks for the interim as they did during the DefExpo?,” asked campaigner and Congress leader Avinash Tavares. “Why set up permanent towers?”

He added, “Or they should just admit BRICS is an excuse and they are using the summit to push their towers on a massive scale in residential areas.”

The protests had no effect on the authorities. As telecom companies pushed their agenda, the Bharatiya Janata Party government threatened to bypass the panchayats to set up the towers. Media reports quoted Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar as saying they would be forced to “bring out weapons” against the protestors if they continued to oppose the towers.

The government also sent teams of private doctors, some of who were allegedly party sympathisers, to the affected areas to address concerns about radiation but they failed to convince the people.

Road widening

The telecom towers were not the only problem. On a 4-km stretch of road leading to the luxury hotels that will host the summit programmes, fully grown fruit and rain trees were felled so that the road could be widened. The residents said the authorities acted without informing them.

“They spared nothing,” said Jasmine Fernandes, who runs a bakery there. “Every roadside tree was cut for road expansion for BRICS. Now, we have no shade and the road looks like a desert.”

Newspapers also reported that slums were cleared and religious structures moved.

Residents said the felling and clearing exercise had left the road in a mess, with most of the speed breakers flattened, but that authorities had repaired it in a hurry.

“For four years, this road was in very bad shape with the authorities digging it up to lay cables of all sorts, creating a daily hazard for residents,” said Dr Belinda Viegas, a resident of the area. “To tarmac it hurriedly just before BRICS is an indication that the welfare of people and residents do not matter, but fake prestige does.”

The postponement of examinations and a ban on fishing and water sports for several days before and after the summit have further rankled residents. Many said it was unfair for fishermen to suffer losses while luxury hotels made profit.

Business opportunity

But while the BRICS summit has angered residents, hotels and other businesses in the area are smelling opportunity.

Comparisons to the 1983 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting retreat at Fort Aguada Hermitage in North Goa are already being made. That meet had catapulted Goa internationally as a tourist destination.

It had also extracted a heavy price from home owners in five villages, who had lost their land to make way for the expansion of the hotel and the road leading to it.

On the Colva-Cavelossim belt in South Goa too, where the BRICS summit will be held, many of the beach-front luxury hotels have similar backstories of displaced villagers and fishing communities.

Tavares said he believed BRICS was just the beginning and “there seems to be a long-term plan for this area with its many high-end luxury hotels”.

He added, “They are steadily putting in infrastructure and thrusting it down people’s throats in a fascist manner while slowly ghettoising people into a corner.”

According to Tavares, the plan is to turn the northern and southern extremes of the 105-km-long Goa coastline into luxury tourism hubs while setting up more casinos and nightclubs in Central and North Goa. An indication of this could be the influx and rising domination of big outstation players and the steady marginalisation of residents.