"Making Goans Servants to the Tourism Master Plan" in THE GOAN EVERYDAY (16 October 2016)

Though the Goa Tourism Master Plan commissioned by the government expects to renew the industry, it fails to imagine a role for Goans that extends beyond that of service-providers.

 Buried within the recently released Tourism Master Plan (TMP) that the Goan government commissioned from the multinational corporation KPMG is this vision of how Goans are to be involved in the marketing of their homeland: “Campaigns with state coverage should be undertaken to inform citizens and raise their awareness on the importance of tourism and tourism hospitality. In addition, a civic pride campaign should promote the uniqueness, protection and the importance to conserve the national Natural and Cultural heritages of Goa (either monuments or living culture and nature) while encouraging Goans to travel and visit destinations within their Taluka and others” (p. 83). Well, the last time I checked, Goans do travel quite often “within their Talukas and others”. It’s called going to work.

The TMP not only envisages Goans as potential clients of the tourism industry in their own backyards, but it also wants to position them as servants to that industry rather than as stakeholders. So, even as the section of the TMP that is aimed at Goans is entitled “Building Awareness among Local Stakeholders”, it is additionally given the subheading “A Key Success Factor”, which suggests that the outlined measures are business tactics geared towards making Goans pliable as a source of labour. The delineated strategies include a list of four campaigns.

The first, “Goan Pride”, is meant to “encourage domestic travels … in order to transmit the importance for Goans to know and feel their State”. It is followed by “Tourism Awareness in Schools”, which “seeks to promote the importance of tourism for the State of Goa among young people and highlight … career opportunities” Yes, Goans should be invested in knowing about Goa and should be exposed to in-state career options. But even as the TMP touts education to boost state pride and dangles livelihoods before those of school-going age, its purpose in doing so is less for the betterment of Goans than it is to inculcate what in business-speak is referred to as a ‘buy-in’ into tourism.

 This is troubling for it is directed towards shaping the minds of the impressionably young, but equally so because the suggested pride-building in Goa is of a nationalistic ilk. Or so KPMG would have us believe, for under the ostensibly titled “Sustainable Tourism Awareness” campaign that wants to create “a culture which respects [the] environment”, the plan also recommends that this be done “by strengthening the national identity and pride”. In effect, then, it is not just that Goan youth are being asked to be environmentally and culturally conscious, but that such awareness be harnessed in profiting the nation, for the green and clean nation, here, is the brand that is being sold to tourists.

It should also be noticed that at the same time as the TMP shackles environmentalism to nationalism, it has little to offer in terms of concrete measures regarding how the environment should be protected (one wonders how far the nice-sounding idea of respecting the environment can go in saving it), leave alone the lack of sustainability of tourism in general. The shallowness of the TMP is symptomatic of how KPMG operates. In an article tellingly headlined “Critics see KPMG Report as ‘Smoke and Mirrors’” (22 July, 2011), The Toronto Star informs how a commissioned service review for the Canadian city of Toronto, essentially boiled down to KPMG outlining what services should be axed. When the company’s representatives were questioned by a Councillor about whether they had “considered long-term costs associated with cutting support to business improvement areas? [And] [w]hat about the economic benefits of arts funding, social services and entrepreneurship support?”, they simply responded: “We weren’t asked to quantify the impacts of reducing or eliminating the service”.

 In the case of Goa, the marriage of alleged environmental awareness, national consciousness, and business firmly aligns such corporations as KPMG and the State in ensuring the neoliberal promise of delivering Goa and Goans at the altar of so-called national progress while promoting corporate business interests. While Goans are charged with rendering service to the nation, little is said of what KPMG and the government will do to ensure the protection of Goa’s natural heritage, and even less about what will be done to support the creation and retention of homegrown businesses. As further evidence of the servitude that is expected of Goans in the tourism industry, consider that the last of the four campaigns, which is labelled “Goan Hosts”, sets out how it will “[develop] training programs on customer service”. While all kinds of employment should accord those in service respect and rights, what does it mean when a government-commissioned master plan only foresees the role of the people of its state as “hosts” and not as entrepreneurs or innovators?

In designating the place of Goans as those who are to be employed or are to be educated in providing service, the government and KPMG have fixed the future of many Goans within a narrow gamut of opportunities that do not encourage creativity, leadership, or innovation. This is extremely myopic, since the TMP is meant to envision Goa’s future as a tourism destination over the next 25 years. Between KPMG and the State, it has been decided that Goa must serve simultaneously as a pleasure periphery for India’s fun-seekers, but also as a hub for business providers from elsewhere who will profit off the land and its people while little investment is made for any purposes beyond the promotion and retention of corporate tourism.   

From The Goan Everyday.

"You Came, You Saw..." in THE GOAN EVERYDAY (18 September 2016)

While others have the luxury of leaving when they find Goa is no longer pristine, it is Goans who have to continue to bear the consequences of a deteriorating environment. 

 

It wasn’t so much the issue that Goans were being told that there was something rotten in their homeland. No, this would assume that Deepti Kapoor was actually aware of the presence of Goans. To be fair, in her article “An Idyll No More: Why I’m Leaving Goa” (The Guardian, 7 September, 2016), Kapoor registers an impressive set of real grievances. She laments the pollution of the beaches with “plastic bags” and “shards of glass from … bottles”. She decries the condition of “the hills and roadsides, covered in garbage”, as well as “the earth inland that mining has stripped bare”. She denounces the “floating casinos and effluent” in the Mandovi river. She has decided to leave, the dream now having turned into a nightmare.

Kapoor tells her readers that she moved from Bombay to Goa eight years ago along with her husband so that she “could study yoga”, and because of “the beaches! The restaurants! The music, and the people!” (Yes, she really is that overenthusiastic with her use of exclamation marks!) She reveals that “when the sun is setting over a village called Aldona, and the evening bread is delivered on the backs of bicycles, you can convince yourself that Goa is all right”. But nostalgia no longer serving to blunt the vagaries of development, Kapoor feels it is time to call it quits. Given all the ills that she lists, who can blame her? Except that it is exactly people like Kapoor who are the problem, and even more so that they fail to see themselves as being at fault. 

For Kapoor, the inconveniences she lists are something she can escape. Yet this is not the luxury available to the people of Goa. And if Goans must leave their land, it is not always because they have a choice in the matter. That “village called Aldona” is the place my paternal family has called home for more than a century. I often wonder what my now deceased grandmother whose home once overlooked the greenest paddy fields would think of the changes in Aldona. What would she make of the altered landscape, where second homes built to serve as vacation getaways for upper class Indians have become commonplace? 

A wise woman, she would recognise that the cost of living has shot up to such an extent, that Aldonkars not of means have been priced out of the real estate market in their ancestral lands. And in the waters, those Goans whose traditional occupation is fishing, must continue to rely upon the catch, regardless of the pollution which threatens their livelihood, their health, and that of those who eat what Kapoor describes as “shellfish … decimated by coliform bacteria...”, among other forms of affected water life.

But it is as if Goans do not exist for Kapoor who like so many other Indian sojourners consider the region to be solely the preserve of those of their ilk – the yoga-learning dilettantes and those with the option of decamping to “Europe or Latin America”, as Kapoor says she might because things in Goa are so rough. Sure, Kapoor mentions “Reginald or Tulsidas or Lata or Maria [who] stand at the front gate speaking to that passerby at dusk…”, but in the same way as she lists the beaches! The restaurants! The music! At the end of which index she adds “the people”, almost as an afterthought and as much as the backdrop for and the service providers of the idyllic life she bemoans the foreclosing of.

No doubt, Kapoor does convey the efforts of some Goans who have been doing their bit to save the environment. The writer also highlights such entrenched issues as systemic corruption and an economic overreliance on tourism without the creation of adequate infrastructure to protect beaches or the tourists who frequent them (again, it is as if the safety of locals must come second, if they are to be thought of at all). Additionally, she refers to the destruction of six villas (which she misclassifies as “Portuguese”) – heritage homes that are being torn down to make way for luxury apartments that will not house Goans. Of course, it would be naïve to believe that Goans are not part of the many problems enumerated by Kapoor, but their involvement in the ongoing destruction of Goa’s natural and architectural heritage does not occur in a vacuum. 

As Raghuraman Trichur argues in his book Refiguring Goa (2013), it was the rise of tourism in the coastal location that first made the Indian bourgeoisie interested in Goa economically. There was once a time when my parents were able to run a small home-based tourism business, but their little outfit folded when larger corporations started to set up shop in Goa. Today, as Kapoor finds, while many Indian tourists come to Goa, they contribute little to the local economy, for much of the money sustains the corporations rather than the actual location. 

Indians continue to find Goa attractive as an investment opportunity, with real estate topping that list. Completely blind to the irony, Kapoor finds common cause to commiserate with one “Phil from England, who has been coming [to Goa] for 25 years, [and who] said: ‘The joke I made this season was, we all used to say Goa was not the real India, but now REAL India has turned up’.” Yes, Phil. And that REAL India looks like Deepti Kapoor, the interloper who got what they wanted, leaving a mess for others to deal with.

From The Goan.