Extra-Smart City shenanigans for Panaji

The tiny riverside capital of India’s smallest state commemorates its 175th year even as the urban centrepiece of Goa is in disrepair, with the achievements of generations past literally crumbling to bits on the roadside. Meanwhile, large sums are now set to be squandered on egregious, unnecessary, site-inappropriate technology that ignores the most basic needs of city residents and visitors alike. Instead of improvements to quality of life, these extra-smart shenanigans will benefit no one other than the usual suspects in a small coterie of cronies.

The cruel irony is that Panjim embodies smart city planning in its very DNA. It was the first rigorously planned and designed city in India in the colonial era, the very first to be laid out in a grid pattern with broad sidewalks on all streets. Its 19th century city fathers took ideas for drainage and sanitation from Europe, and made sure to create plazas and open spaces for the benefit of all residents. Anyone familiar with the colonial-era photographs of low-rise, flaneur-friendly

Panaji

cannot help being dismayed at the current state of the roads and pavements, where simply walking in a straight line is impossible and often hazardous.

The feisty London-based activist Carmen Miranda grew up in

Altinho

, overlooking Panaji in the 1950s. Recently, she wrote on Facebook, “I knew a Panjim that viewed from my house in Altinho, looked like a coconut plantation, and where all the buildings and houses were below the hight of a coconut tree by law. The transformation since 1950s is huge, and not particularly nice...the holes, broken pavements, garbage, noise, chaotic traffic, entire pavements surrounded and blocked by motorbikes and cars. Panjim is decrepit, dilapidated, crowded and dirty. It does not have to be that way.”

Miranda nails the most important issues facing the city, each of which could easily be solved given political will. But matters like impassable pavements are not on the minds of so-called Smart City planners. Instead it is all big-budget electronics costing many millions of dollars. A city reeling from an onslaught of garbage piled on streets and thrown in the river is supposed to get a “technology-based solid waste management system” that would fit “every household in the city with QR codes” to feed data into an “integrated Command and Control Centre” where there will be “minimal human engagement”. The rather ludicrous end result of all this, we are told, is that the city will know whose garbage has been collected.

Most absurd of all is another extra-smart plan to install at least 450 advanced digital cameras on Panaji’s lampposts, equipped with facial and number plate recognition. This tender alone is estimated to rise above Rs 250 crore. Why does Panaji need even one of these military-grade cameras? How can the city justify such expenditure, while ignoring elementary needs? There are no answers here to satisfy anyone, let alone respect the constitutional rules of democratic engagement. ‘

Dedd Xanno

’, indeed.

The writer is a photographer & widely published columnist. Views are personal.