Parra village completes Regional Plan 2021 exercise

By Claude Alvares

It may be interesting and instructive to study the way in which Parra village in Bardez has drawn up its Regional Plan 2021. While most other villages have rejected the copy of the Draft RP2021 of their village sent to them by the BDO because of obvious errors, Parra decided to use the opportunity given to it by the government for conducting its own exercise instead.

Last week, Parra’s 20-member Village Level Committee on Regional Plan 2021 completed its work on the plan. The new Land Use and Development Plan drawn up by it is now put up for display at the Panchayat Ghor and other public places for final corrections from the public.

Also accompanying the Land Use Map is a copy of the regulations that are to be read together with the Plan and which have been drawn up by the Committee after discussions.

The new plan is being put up for the final approval of the Gram Sabha on 22nd February 2009, before it is sent to the government for inclusion in RP2021. The general scheme of the plan had been approved by the Gram Sabha at a meeting earlier.

The Parra Village Committee on RP2021 performed two major exercises on the plan. It first carried out corrections to the copy of the draft Regional Plan 2021 sent to the panchayat by the BDO. After the corrections were carried out, the committee recommended certain modifications to the Regional Plan 2021 to the extent required for the further development and conservation of the village.

This is the first time in several decades that the people of the various wards in the village have come together to participate in the planning exercise. The participation was enthusiastic and the committee held more than 15 meetings which most members always attended. Several parts of the village were physically visited and revisited.

The village committee comprised representatives of all the 13 wards of the village in addition to the panchas and sarpanch of the village. (Due to the restrictive time schedule, individual ward level meetings, however, could not be held.) The committee was technically assisted in the preparation of maps by two outside consultants. These included the Goa Foundation and the Porvorim-based architecture firm called Mosaic. Both declined to charge any fees.

How did the Committee proceed? Simple! It scanned – for the princely sum of sixty rupees – the map that the Panchayat had received from the BDO (at Oasis, Panjim). The scale of this map was enhanced to 1:2500. Thereafter, various sections were parcelled out to the ward members who matched the information depicted on the map with their own intimate, day-to-day knowledge of their wards. The corrections were then incorporated in the soft copy, fresh prints were made, again subjected to scrutiny, etc. It took more than ten versions to be printed out in full colour till all the committee members were fully satisfied. The bare cost of preparing and printing out copies of the plan as it evolved cost the Parra Panchayat more than Rs.10,000. (The government has not made available any financial resources for this work in any case.)

After this was accomplished, the second part of the plan was discussed, including the FAR and road widening proposals.

The public also welcomed the idea of marking a two-feet broad line on the left side of every road within the village that would be henceforth available exclusively for pedestrians and cyclists. A jogging track was identified along the bank of a tributary of the Baga river. Bird nesting sites were identified. The committee restored the cattle path to the village hill for grazing purposes.

One of the most important decisions of the Committee was the reservation of Parra hill as a permanent forest of the village. Though parts of the hill are thickly forested, while others have been reafforested by the Forest Department, the entire hill was demarcated as forest/proposed forest. There was complete unanimity in the village in respect of declaring the Parra hill as forest/proposed forest and for maintaining the paddy fields free of all construction.

The Committee also decided that the village will be kept free of industries except for those marked under the green category of the Goa State Pollution Control Board list of industries. However, such industries will only be allowed at cottage level, if at all. The existing Regional Plan had only one plot in Parra which had been changed earlier to industrial. However, the committee decided that this would revert to settlement zone as the particular industrial unit had long since ceased operations.

The second most important feature of the plan was the decision of the committee to revert the village to VP3 status.

According to the Draft RP2021, the density of population in Parra works out to 755 persons per sq.km. However, this figure is misleading, since the density has been worked out including the forest, orchard and paddy areas which are not to be used for development or settlement. If one uses the area of the settlement area alone, the density in 2001 works out to 3205 persons per sq.km. This is already quite high. In 2021, the density, assuming an increase in population to 5334 persons, would work out to 4482 persons per sq.km! This has greatly influenced the preparation of the present landuse and development plan, forcing the village to seek development controls including VP3 status, with FAR of only 30 for plots in excess of 4000 sq.mts.

The housing developments are further sought to be controlled by ensuring that the building will not be more than ground plus one with permissible height of 9 mts to the highest ridge of the roof. No stilt parking will be permitted.

The committee decided to maintain the existing width of the roads in the village. These were measured and fixed on the map. The committee recommended that width of village roads and road widening areas should not exceed 6 mts even in those areas where road widening was possible.

It was also decided to mark one section of the village as a conservation zone so that visitors can have a first hand idea of a Goan village that is well preserved.

The committee took a dissenting view on allocation of a site for garbage. It did so on good, rational grounds. Today Parra is the only village in Goa which has a regular Sunday collection of non-biodegradable waste which is then sent to recyclers. All other biodegradable wastes are taken care of by individual households. Since the garbage problem is therefore handled in an intelligent manner, it was decided not to go in for a garbage site which was bound to be either misused or would degenerate into a dump.

The land use map demarcates the paddy fields settlement areas, orchard and forest areas the district roads, panchayat roads and village roads. The development plan lists the names of all the vaddos in the village and unique ecological features including village kondlem (water collection points), udos, nallahs, bird nesting sites, and groves of coconut and banyan trees.

All intersections in the village are being redesigned as no-development zones to ensure that there will be no accidents at such junctions.

Parra villagers are a wiser lot today. They have discovered the following truths after their exercises in planning for their village:
As far as Parra is concerned, the 1986-2001 Regional Plan was nothing but a faithful copy of the gradual developments within the village environment over several decades. In other words, the RP 2001 merely based itself on the built environment already existing in the village and added nothing new. This means that villagers, without the benefit of planning, retained an instinctive regard for ecology.
However, between the period 1986-2001, because of the enormous corruption, the Town Planning Board and Department allowed questionable constructions in paddy fields and even places like traffic junctions in violation of planning and safety norms in the village. One two storeyed building was in fact allowed on a major intersection where road accidents have been quite common. In fact, under the garb of planning, the department actually tried to play havoc with the built-up scheme of the village that had evolved over hundreds of years.

Large number of errors crept into the Draft RP2021 simply because the draft Regional Plan was carelessly and mechanically blown up village-wise, with the result that in most cases, there was massive distortion through which settlement areas were found to encroach into paddy fields and orchards; existing forest areas became orchards, and so on.

However, the most important discovery of the villagers was that the draft RP2021 sent to them by the government was actually bereft of any planning features in respect of the needs of the village. The Town Planning Department had merely reduced the planning exercise to demarcating settlement, orchard and paddy fields with ideal road widths, without taking into account ground realities.

On the other hand, the Parra Land Use and Development Plan prepared by the village has for the first time identified places for markets (permanent and seasonal), play fields (permanent and seasonal), parks and medical facilities and areas for conservation including heritage houses. It proposes to revitalise agriculture through organic farming and to support all small trades in the village. It has also set aside certain areas for the use of future generations. If other Goan villages do not survive, this one at least should. There is still a lot of work to be done, but a beginning has been made.