Open to further talks, says CM as demarcation spurs chaos at Bhoma

Panaji: There was chaos at Bhoma on Tuesday morning when PWD engineers reached the village to carry out the demarcation of land to show the villagers the alignment of the road expansion, as promised a day earlier in a meeting with chief minister Pramod Sawant.
While the PWD engineers said that their visit was to help villagers understand the dimensions of the proposed road widening, Bhoma villagers said the engineers had only come to demarcate land for the project under the guise of giving insights.
During the previous visits, villagers had disallowed officials from carrying out the demarcation until their doubts were clarified. Heated arguments broke out as the villagers questioned PWD engineers on Tuesday.
The PWD officials’ visit was as decided during the villagers’ discussion a day earlier with Sawant. The CM on Tuesday said that he is still open to further dialogue.
“I have told the people. Let there be marking on the site and if they have any apprehensions, we will sit together and talk it out again,” Sawant said. “The chief minister is ready for a dialogue and is willing to listen to everyone.”
The villagers said that the officials failed to show them the road alignment as promised. “We had said mark the columns and beams and show us where they will be located. But they are marking land for acquisition,” said Sanjay Naik, a villager. “We asked them to show us the alignment, but they had no alignment to show us. They are fooling us.”
Naik added, “They cannot fit a six-lane road in 25m. On what basis are they saying that our demand for a bypass is not feasible, when an agreement for a bypass was made when Manohar Parrikar was the chief minister and even the route was identified.”
PWD officials on the site said that they were demarcating the land to show the villagers where the edges of the road will be once widened under the project.
The locals refused to accept that the road will be only 25m wide after the expansion. They claimed that the road is expected to be 60m wide. They alleged that the land of the key temples in the villages will be lost to the expansion project.