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Traffic chokes
Panjim
Shocking but true, around 45,865 vehicles enter
Panjim while 42,145 exit the capital city everyday.
The city witnesses heavy traffic jams on a
day-to-day basis more so during peak hours, thanks
to the lackadaisical attitude of the government in
striking a balance between projects and parking
facilities. The Goa Police Traffic Cell and the
Transport Department plan to ease the traffic
situations in the city have so far remained only on
paper with no concrete steps being taken by the
authorities, sources disclosed. The State annually
registers a total of around 60,000 new vehicles,
including two and four wheelers, with the Transport
Department collecting road taxes worth crores,
however, the government has made no serious attempts
whatsoever the parking, sources added. “The traffic
situation in the capital city is going from bad to
worse,” sources stated. [H] |
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Environment
ministry decides to grant special status for Goa
The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests at its
meeting chaired by the Minister of State for
Environment and Forests (Independent charge), Mr
Jairam Ramesh, decided not to permit any Special
Economic Zone within the Coastal Regulation Zone
area in Goa and it was also decided to grant Goa
‘special status.’ Addressing a press conference late
on Tuesday evening, the Environment Minister Mr
Aleixo Sequeira told reporters that this new
decision would be notified soon. He said that the
Congress-led government headed by Mr Digambar Kamat
has been pursuing the matter with the central
ministry which has accepted the state’s request and
decided to grant Goa special status. He further said
that the MoEF had clarified that Goa State Pollution
Control Board would enjoy full powers in issuing
orders/directions under Environment Protection Act,
adding further that order to this effect would be
issued soon. He also said that the ministry has also
clarified on earlier restrictions and said that they
no longer were in force. [NT] |
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‘Vovllik’ of
the First World Konkani Cultural Convention
Poilo Vixv Konknni Sanskrutik Mahamell (The First
World Konkani Cultural Convention) is being
organized from November 25 to December 19, 2010 at
Kalaangann, Mangalore. In this 25 days world level
Konkani Cultural Festival over 60 cultural troupes
from all over the world are participating. Goa being
the ‘Mull Pith’ of Konkani, about 30 cultural
troupes presenting all cultural forms from Goa
namely folk music, tiatr, nattok, etc will be
showcased in the festival.
click here to read more |
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Titan Salvage
seeks 2 weeks to cut Princess
The officials of M/s Titan Salvage, Singapore, whom
the government had decided 'in principle' to award
the tender to cut the grounded M V River Princess
vessel at Sinquerim beach on Monday sought two weeks
time to submit the details about the exact scrap
value after cutting the vessel and the condition of
'no cure no pay' adopted by the Salvage operators
worldwide. The state government had called the
representatives of M/s Titan Salvage Company for
some clarification after the State Disaster
Management Authority on July 7, had decided 'in
principle' to award the contract to the
Singapore-based company, which had submitted a bid
of Rs 125 crore and a period of eight months to cut
the vessel and take it seawards. [GT] |
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Govt to
undertake communidade land for afforestation too
The State Forest Department will undertake 450
hectares of government forest and communidade land
for afforestation, this monsoon. The set target for
the year 2010-11 is 450 ha, which includes 150 ha
land under Compensatory Afforestation fund
Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) scheme
amounting to Rs 50-60 lakh. “The afforestation is
taken up for enriching the existing plantation in
the State. The plantation will be carried out in the
degraded forest areas of the state,” Deputy
Conservator of Forest, Planning and Statistics,
Sanjay Waradkar told Herald. Waradkar said that of
the total targeted area, 30 ha land is under
communidade while the rest is government owned
forest areas. The drive that begin in June, will
plant species like teak, acacias and other
indigenous verities. The department expects to cover
the entire 450 ha by mid July. [H] |
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Dhangar
children in state schools to get free cycles under
govt scheme
After increasing the budgetary allocation to Rs 7
lakh for this academic year as against Rs 6 lakh
last year, the Department of Social Welfare is in
the process of distributing forms to over 200
schools spread over seven talukas for distributing
free cycles to children of Gouly/Dhangar families.
The Minister for Social Welfare, Mr Ramkrishna
Dhavalikar had distributed 201 cycles in April this
year for the academic year 2009-2010. Sources in the
Social Welfare department, on condition of
anonymity, said that the forms are being sent to
various schools in the talukas of Sanguem, Quepem,
Canacona, Pernem, Ponda, Bicholim and Sattari which
have a sizeable population of Dhangar community. The
source said that inthe last academic year the
government distributed 89 ladies cycles and 112
gents cycles. [NT] |
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Woman jumps to
death from GMC after testing HIV+
A 38-year-old woman hailing from North Goa committed
suicide hours after she was diagnosed with HIV. This
woman was admitted in the Goa Medical College at
Bambolim with fever on July 9, Deputy Superintendent
of Police Deu Benaulikar informed. She was subjected
to blood tests in the hospitals on her admission.
The doctors Sunday evening told her she was detected
with HIV. The woman who is apparently married
allegedly jumped off the first floor of the GMC
building at 6:30am on July 13. |
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Goa wants tourists to romance with rains
www.zeenews.com
June 24, 2010, 13:48 IST
Panaji: Goa's crowded beaches wear a largely
deserted look during the monsoon, a scene which the
state government intends to change by promoting
'raindrop tourism'.
Swimming is banned on beaches after the south west
monsoon hits the state. But the June-September
period is also the time for a different experience
with giant sea waves hitting the shores, cool breeze
welcoming tourists and numerous streams sprouting
amidst lush green landscape.
The Tourism Department is set to sell the concept of
raindrop tourism, especially to travellers from West
Asia, where rains are sparse.
For this authorities are streamlining the
promotional campaign. "We lack integrated campaign.
Our promotional campaigns are distributed amongst
multiple agencies. Other states have a single agency
doing the job," Swapnil Naik, Director, Goa Tourism,
told reporters.
Official figure state that of the total tourist
inflow, around 10 per cent are received during
monsoons.
The coastal state is facing tough competition from
Kerala, which has branded itself as God's Own
Country and aggressively promotes backwater tourism
concept. Goa Tourism Development Corporation (GTDC),
which has 13 properties, has introduced discount
offers under themes like 'monsoon glee' and 'monsoon
honeymoon' at its resorts and hotels to attract
holiday-makers during the off season. |
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Liberating nuns of India - Goa's Institute Mater Dei
shapes a
generation
National Catholic Reporter, Jul. 09, 2010
By Paul Wilkes, freelance writer and author of In Due
Season: A
Catholic Life
Posted on: goanet-news-bounces@lists.goanet.org
http://ncronline.org/news/women-religious/liberating-nuns-india
 OLD
GOA, INDIA -- It was once a place where pious and
obedient nuns
came to escape the world, vowing that their silence
would speak beyond
any words they could utter.
Today, the convent of St. Monica is a hotbed of
feminist theology and
one of South Asia’s foremost centers of graduate
education for
religious women. The young sisters who attend classes
here are
encouraged -- even prodded -- to speak up forcefully
and act boldly to
not only to serve God’s people in their various
ministries, but to
redress India’s endemic male-dominated culture, both
in secular
society and the church itself.
The Institute Mater Dei, housed in St. Monica’s, a
450-year-old former
Augustinian cloistered convent, is the bold statement
by the women’s
section of the Conference of Religious India that not
only priests and
brothers should undertake advanced studies in
theology, philosophy and
leadership, but that nuns, who outnumber male
religious 4-to-1 in this
nation, not only can but will forge a new role for
women, both lay and
religious.
 And
if Sr. Gretta D’Souza’s class studying the Gospel of
St. John is
any indication, this Ursuline Franciscan is speaking
to a group of
women ready and eager for a larger, more significant
role in the
Catholic church of India. The subject on this
crystalline clear
morning in tropical Goa, in a high vaulted classroom
with 20-foot
ceilings that was once a dormitory for sisters who
willingly accepted
their place in the church’s structure, is the familiar
story of the
Samaritan woman at the well.
“Why would Jesus choose a woman, this woman of a -- if
you will -- a
caste that Jews had nothing to do with? Why would he
choose her to the
bearer of the news of a Messiah to her community? Why
would he talk
high theology with a person who had no standing, no
worth whatsoever?”
D’Souza’s fist punctuates the end of each sentence,
her eyes moving
from student to student, asking not for an answer just
yet, her voice
subtly building in volume to heighten the moment. Her
class of 32
sisters, their eyes fixed on her, have temporarily
forsaken completing
their neatly written thoughts in the notebooks before
them.
“Because she was a woman. Because she was open.
Because she was
thirsty for more than water. Because she would go back
to her
Samaritan community and share with the other women
that she had met --
no, she had experienced -- someone the likes of whom
she had never
seen before. Because she would tell the man she was
living with that
Jesus knew he was not her husband, but that it didn’t
matter that she,
this dishonored woman with serial marriages and now no
marriage, still
had worth.”
Her class -- nuns of olive skin and Asian features
from the far north
of India, to those with the many-hued variations and
features of east,
west and south of this sprawling land of over a
billion people -- is a
mosaic of India. The students represent 26 communities
of religious
women, and if conversations with a good number of them
during a recent
two-day visit are at all representative, they are
anything but the
obeisant sisters of India’s past (See story).
In their late 20s and 30s, these sisters who never
knew a church
before the Second Vatican Council are being formed to
carry out the
council’s mandate to bring the church into the world,
and not to serve
as handmaids to priests or “decorators,” a role one
religious leader
in India warned them they must cast off. “The Second
Vatican Council
challenged the religious to enter into a dialogue with
the postmodern,
globalized world,” the institute’s informational
booklet reads. “The
radical interpretation of religious life demands from
us entirely new
and courageous initiatives.”
Theirs is not so much the rage that fired the women’s
movement in the
West, but a steely determination to not only stand
with poor and
oppressed women to redress the dominant role of men in
the society,
but also to break through the top-down governance they
see in their
own congregations, so that younger sisters will have a
voice.
“Jesus is not only the Messiah, he is a very canny
social worker,”
D’Souza continues. “He knows the woman is the heart of
the family, the
first educator of the young. He knows women talk,” she
hesitates for
emphasis, “and talk about real things that matter.”
After a break for midmorning tea, D’Souza asks the
class for examples
of how this passage plays out in their ministries, and
hands shoot up.
“We work to include everyone; when students from
different castes come
into our school, they tend to keep in their own
group,” says one
sister. “We make them sit alphabetically and we do
everything we can
to force them to reach across caste lines.”
“We have centers for prostitutes and that is good, but
it isn’t
enough,” says another. “We can’t wait for them to come
to us. We have
to be more active, to prevent them from taking up this
life in the
first place. So we sisters go right to the hotel
managers. We go to
the places where people exchange money, places where
we can confront
the men in charge to stop this practice. Yes, at first
they tell us we
are sisters, we are out of place. But we look at them
straight on and
say: ‘This is our place, you don’t have to think
anymore about it.’ ”
This class on John’s Gospel is one of 35 in the
yearlong theological
curriculum for this year’s class of 63 sisters. Other
courses range
from eco-philosophy to the theology of social
analysis.
There is also a yearlong curriculum for future
formation directors,
which has 31 sisters this year, taking such classes as
“Holistic
Health: Mind, Body, Spirit and Personality
Assessment.” Another
curriculum in philosophy, with 17 sisters, has classes
ranging from
“Hunger and Violence,” to the history of philosophy,
ancient to the
present.
But the excitement this term at Institute Mater Dei
centers on the
approval to begin a full three-year course in
theology. The Pontifical
Institute of Philosophy and Religion, Jnana-Deepa
Vidyapeeth, in Pune,
the degree-granting school under which Mater Dei
functions, has
acknowledged both the school’s excellent faculty --
some of India’s
most accomplished religious academics -- as well as
the need, making
this the only advanced graduate school of theology for
women in India.
“Also, there is a great gap in significant research
and writing about
women’s issues,” says Sr. Jyoti Fernandes, an Ursuline
Franciscan who
is the director of the institute. “We have a lot of
practical
knowledge, but with the founding of the Mater Dei
Academy we will
employ good scholarship, concentrating specifically on
women, all
aspects of their lives, culture and heritage. We will
create an online
journal so that we can quickly disseminate what we
learn.”
“Women’s ordination and all the hot-button issues of
the West are not
what we are focused on here, “ says D’Souza as we sit
on a bench in
the sun-drenched east arcade where sisters before her
once walked in
silence, their bare feet a cry to heaven to bring
Christ’s message to
the heathen people outside these walls.
“We simply want to bring women into their rightful
place in the
church, so that they return to their ministries not
only with new
knowledge, but with the self-confidence, the assurance
that they are
competent to speak out against injustice, in the
society, in the
church, even within their own congregations. Yes,” she
smiles,
“sometimes it is even a case of women keeping other
women down. They
are afraid to challenge the way things have always
been done.”
That is exactly what Fr. John Snehanand addresses in
his “Leadership
in Formation” class for sisters who will be shaping
the lives of young
postulants in their various congregations. He is a
priest of the
Indian Mission Society. “You will be speaking before
groups and today,
let us look at some of the blocks that you will face
-- all of us face
-- as we become leaders. What goes through our minds?
‘I will fail.
People will not like me if I tell them something they
don’t want to
hear. I will seem like I am going against the
leadership. I may even
seem to be going against the constitutions of my
order. I am not up to
this task.’
“Fear is paralyzing and it will keep you from truly
becoming a leader
of your sisters. What to do?” He pauses. “Face it head
on; that’s what
to do.
“You see, we all want to be in control of every
situation and when we
begin to innovate, it is uncomfortable. But know this,
as well as
anything I will say: the less your self confidence,
the less freedom
you feel to proclaim Gospel values, the less love you
will bring to
your work.
“Did Jesus not express fear? Of course he did. And he
proclaimed, ‘The
Lord is at my side.’ That is scripture and it is so,
but now,” he
smiles slightly, “let’s get some help from the
psychological side.”
Snehanand quickly goes through a list of positive
motivation prompts.
“ ‘People are not against me, they are for me.’ When
you prepare to
give a talk, imagine people nodding their heads,
applauding. Don’t use
the language of powerlessness, like ‘I can’t, it
won’t.’ Instead, say:
‘I will, I can, I choose not to.’
“When you feel this power rising up within you, you
will find you can
do anything, anything.” Was it just imagination or did
members of the
class, already seated with perfect posture, rise up
just a bit higher
in their places? |
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Giving Goan Economy a Boost
Published on: July 4, 2010
www.navhindtimes.in
By Mario Cabral e Sá
It is a very delicate juncture of time, when the
world’s engines of growth are just about emerging out
of recession. We have witnessed an almost
unprecedented global economic meltdown which had taken
the proportion of a crisis.
All the major so called economic superpowers like US,
UK, EU, Japan and Germany acknowledged that their
economies are in recession and worked out various
rescue packages for bailing out major companies which
were going under resulting in massive layoffs.
India too did not escape the brunt of this global
meltdown. The Indian stock market indices had fallen
to half of their levels in less than six months.
Almost all industry sectors were reporting bleak news.
Real Estate, Automotive, Engineering, Capital goods,
and even Software sectors were reporting flat or
negative growth. The GDP Growth rate for the year
2008-09 fell down to 6.7 per cent from about 9 per
cent for the previous year. Though the economy has
recovered to record a growth rate of about 7.2 per
cent in 2009-10, and is showing signs of further
improvement during the current year, we do not know
how many jobs will be created.
Goa, too, did not escape the effects of the global
meltdown. Tourism which accounts for nearly 35 per
cent of the SGDP has reported a downward trend of
about 20 per cent and is yet to fully recover. The
manufacturing sector which contributes about 40 per
cent to the SGDP also reported a slowdown and severe
liquidity crunch. Note the words, no sizeable
investments has taken place.
All this have had a impact on the employment scenario
in Goa.
As per the Economic Survey of Goa, the population in
the State in the age group between 10 - 20 is 2,45,000
who have/will enter the job market in next few years
and during the same period around 1,10,000 who are in
the age group 50-60 will retire. Presently, there are
already 1,00,000 unemployed youth in the state, hence
there will be 2,35,000 youth for whom jobs will have
to be created and they will require employment or
career opportunities.
Today, the rate of job creation in the state is
negligible. In the absence of any job opportunities,
nearly 90 per cent of engineering graduates are going
out of the state to seek employment. Major colleges
have not been able to find placements for over 50 per
cent of their graduates. Hence Goan youths have no
alternative but to look for jobs and career
opportunities outside of Goa. The Chamber is deeply
concerned about this issue.
The Government on its own will not be in a position to
provide employment to these youths. Already, the ratio
of Government employees to population is about 1: 25 (
one Government employee for every 25 persons), which
is one of the highest. According to some sources,
there is already an excess employment of about 15-20
per cent in the Government departments.
Tourism accounts for nearly 35 per cent of the SGDP.
This sector has good potential for creation of
job/gainful employment opportunities. But a cursory
look at the mass jobs in the tourism sector will show
that cheaper migrant labour is eating into the job
opportunities of Goans.
There are no more tax holidays in Goa. With the Tax
Holidays in Himachal Pradesh and other Hilly Northern
States, most job creating investments, which should
have normally come to Goa, are going to those states.
Another worrying factor is the deterioration of basic
infrastructure like water, power, roads, etc. Despite
of being a heavy rainfall area, the distribution
system has collapsed and most industrial areas are
facing severe water shortages. The power shortages and
the poor quality of power is another factor that
deters investments in the state. Poor quality of roads
coupled with closure of Zuari Bridge for heavy
traffic, the movement of industrial traffic is
severely affected. If the Government does not take
immediate steps to upgrade the infrastructure we
donâ’t foresee any major industries coming to Goa
which will further compound Goa’s woes.
The new taxes and the rates of taxes proposed by the
Government in the last two budgets show the
Government’s desperation in raising revenues with most
of the burden being put on industrial sector. This is
another disincentive for new industrial investments in
Goa.
More than the effects of global meltdown, the Chamber
is worried about the existing resistance to any and
every developmental activity in the State. While
acknowledging the genuine environmental concerns, the
Chamber advocates that the Government take immediate
proactive steps to invite environment friendly
industries which match local skill sets so that the
local youth get good employment opportunities. Goa
should invite clean and green industries to the
hinterland and create an economic growth centre. We
have to understand that the USP of Goa is its beauty
and at no point we should compromise to this effect.
Developing the hinterland will create employment
opportunities in the rural sector and thus maintaining
a good rural to urban population balance/ratio. In
fact the Chamber favours half SEZs.
At present the major expenditure from the tourism
budget is towards advertising Goa in the International
market. We propose that the emphasis now be on the
domestic market and tourism infrastructure. We
strongly recommend that at least 50 per cent of the
tourism development budget be reserved for development
of tourism infrastructure in the State.
The Chamber feels that it is time that some measures
are taken before the situation moves beyond control.
It favours the creation of one or two SEZs and desires
better co-ordination with government.
http://www.navhindtimes.in/panorama/giving-goan-economy-boost |
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