A Flight Of The Piggish

• The Project: Second Goa airport cleared even after many red flags from ICAO, state expenditure committee

• The Contract: Concessionaire to get 232 acres even if project is cancelled; hefty per day compensation for delay

• The cronies: Louis Berger Group, in dock for bribing Goa ex-CMs, again the consultant for MOPA airport project

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One of former US president Bill Clinton’s favourite quotes is: “You can put wings on a pig, but that doesn't make it an eagle.” The pun­chline, though, doesn’t seem to apply to successive governme­nts drawn from Goa’s tight-knit political elite, who continue to bulldoze through an astonishingly ill-conceived billion-dollar “second airport” project in the north of India’s smallest state. Despite the fact that outrageous scandals emerge every time the project is submitted to any kind of scrutiny, Mopa continues to rumble to take-off.

The latest head-shaking moment came last week when the state’s undersecretary (finance expenditure), Sushma Kamat, rai­sed red flags of alarm when CM Lax­mi­kant Parsekar’s cabinet sent her Mopa’s draft terms of agreement for approval. It turned out that the winning concessionaire would get 232 acres of prime land (out of the project’s total 2,271 acres) “for unrestr­icted use for commercial development”, which could be und­e­r­ta­ken without any prior approval of the town and country planning board.

According to the cabinet-approved terms of agreement, if the project is cancelled for any reason, all that land—mostly seized from reluctant farmers and small landowners—would remain with the concessionaire, along with the license to build without approvals. If the project is delayed—as all projects in Goa always are—the government pays the concessiona­ire a hefty Rs 3.6 lakh per day until resolution.

Stating her case admirably mildly, Ms Kamat noted that “unrestricted land use may be used for commercial activities which may not be beneficial to the state and its people. Handing over such a land mass to a private entity who may develop it for whatever purpose may create third-party rights without adequate compensation to the state government”. But her complaints were ignored, and the Goa cabinet passed the terms of agreement anyway.

The logic for Mopa has always been strained. In order to get the initial go-ahead, the state government had to persuade the Centre to relax its informal rule that no airport would come up less than 150 km from another. Its propone­nts have never been able to explain why North Goa simply can’t use the brand-new greenfield airport nea­ring completion at Sindhudurg, just 100 km from Goa’s border. Now,  there will ostensibly be three international airports lined up in a row close to each other. In 2007, the state sou­ght the expert opinion of the UN’s spe­cia­lised agency, the International Civil Avia­tion Organization (ICAO), on the matter. The findings were unequivocal: Mopa and Dabolim aren’t viable together.

Unhappy with the UN aviation arm’s disapproval of its pet billion-dollar project, the state's political elite turned to their  favourite crony consultant, the Louis Berger Group. This is the same notorious concern which earlier this year admitted in a US court to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by paying approximately $9,76,630 in cash to ex-Goa CMs Digamber Kamat and Churchill Alemao to take control of a Rs 1,000-crore water-supply and sewage project funded by the Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA).

The same James McClung of Louis Berger, who confessed to paying bribes in Goa, became the direct overseer of the Mopa airport project. What the ICAO analysis had found strictly unviable now became viable, at least on paper. The Goa government has paid Louis Berger at least Rs 14 crore so far (despite its tainted legal record, the group remained the Mopa consultant) to push the project closer to development.

There are still some hurdles to be crossed before the first scheduled flights take off from what is still a pastoral, wooded plateau at Mopa, where scores of species of birds can easily be spotted in a single morning. There are petitions before the National Green Tribunal contesting the hasty env­ironmental impact assessment rep­o­rts submitted by the government, and other permissions still to be granted.

But Goa’s people find themselves fighting a growing demographic imbalance, and a rapacious construction lobby advancing fast on several fronts at the same time. Mopa is backed by the state’s politicians as well as the directorate of civil aviation. As proven last week with the egregiously flawed Terms of Agreement, that combination is powerful enough to get its way.

By Vivek Menezes in Goa