With the roads across Goa in a perilous state with potholes galore, it was in poor taste that PWD Minister Nilesh Cabral chose to celebrate his Birthday. It should have been a day when Minister Cabral should have pondered and reflected on how the PWD is now actually a Public Waste Department and a Personal Wealth Department.
Faced with pathetic roads all over, a cosmetic exercise of suspending a few contractors is no solution. The whole system of executing public works including the roads needs to be revamped with the thrust being on strict scrutiny from tender to execution and optimum quality control throughout the project life cycle. Regular audits with full transparency and accountability independent of Ministerial interference must be mandatory.
Will the Government please explain as to why no deterrent action has been taken against MVR Infra Projects Pvt Ltd whose shabby and very substandard public works are on display across Goa for the last many years? Being a close relative of former BJP leader who is currently the Vice- President of India can be no licence to loot and plunder the State exchequer.
Why are Birthdays suddenly grandiose celebrations only after one becomes a minister? It is no secret that contractors in several ways and for their own interests fund the Birthdays of Ministers as an investment where the product is the execution of extortionate sub-standard works at a great loss to the Exchequer, not to the Minister!
Misplaced priorities for personal gratification by Ministers can only make bad dangerous situations in our sinking State even worse.
Our politicians should heed the advice of Brandon Sanderson, a well-known author who said, ‘The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things to accomplish the vital ones’. Or the advice of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a novelist and statesman who said, ‘Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter the least’.
