Row, row, row your boat.....

What’s the point?

One grudgingly, albeit necessarily, at times tends to sympathise with Capt. AP Mascarenhas, the Captain of Ports (CoP.) Saddled with the job of surveying hundreds of barges and with a deputy based in Mormugao, his department’s efficiency is legendary, so much so barge owners, some of whom had a brush with him, admit they once asked Pratapsing Rane when he was chief minister to have him replaced. He however has inherited a marine workshop under the River Navigation Department (RND) which if you use the word incompetent to describe it would hardly cover ten per cent of its ineptitude. The RND has had ministers in charge who, over the last ten years perhaps visited the workshop fewer times than you have fingers on one hand. The current one might even be stretched to find its location.


The Pecking Order

The CoP and his hydrographic surveyor, Sagar Chandra Rai, were ordered by the Home Department to provide mooring space in the Mandovi to five casinos come hell or high water (cannot resist the pun!) Why Home, when you have a have a Minister for Ports and also a River Navigation Minister, is a question that will never be answered. Because, the Captain of Ports Department comes under the Minister for Ports and therefore, at least on paper, he is supposed to be technically equipped to consider the many factors that cause overcrowding in the River Mandovi. From this specialized view point at least, if not for any other, one would assume the Minister for Ports would be involved. Besides, the Home Department does not have the technical expertise or even the jurisdiction. For this same reason, the crores earned from licensing the casinos should go to the River Navigation Department which could use it to build new and modern ferries instead of having to make do with the push-cart ferries it has in its fleet today. But that’s another story. Or, is there another angle to this story? A US journalist Michael S. Malone once said ‘One of the best ways to win any game is to write the rules.’ Strange as it may seem, somehow Ravi Naik appears to have read him!


WWF on the Mandovi

Well almost that if you use your by now well honed sense of imagination. The casinos look like testosterone-driven wrestlers grappling inside a ring that must surely have been miniaturized in Japan. Their physical measurements are: mv Caravela: length 63.05m, breadth 10.20m, depth 3.40m; mv Pride of Goa 66.10m, 23.80m, 4 m; mv The Leela 35.33m, 12.9m, 3.90m; mv Arabian Sea King 30.45m, 9.40m, 3.50m; and mv 70m, 13.40m, 3.75m.


Guess who else is there?

There are 641 barges registered in Goa (452 with the Deputy CoP in Mormugao and 189 with the CoP in Panjim.) Of this figure, 219 barges were operating in Goa when the CoP last made a head count on September 30, 2008. It gets merrier and merrier. There are 20, under 50-passenger capacity tourism-related boats registered with the CoP, permitted to ply in the inland waterways of Goa.

Here’s a stunner – tourist boats less than 15 net tons plying on the beaches of Goa are issued NOC’s by the CoP for the specific period (September 16-May 31.) These types of boats are not issued any registration certificate. In other words no one in the CoP or Home Department (I am being sarcastic here) even glanced at these boats before they were allowed to be risked upon the tourists that come to Goa. In other words these pleasure boats are also a potential peril to tourists. Last year, 218 boats were issued NOC’s to operate between September 16-November 7, 2008. Worse, there are also no dry docking or survey rules laid out by the CoP for the casinos plying in Goa, firstly, because the Indian Steam Vessels Act was written in 1917. Secondly, since the mv Caravela sailed into Goa on February 17, 2001 no one bothered to factor in the casinos. Then again in no other maritime State in India, has a Home Department ever been even remotely involved with floating ships of any kind.


Floating sumos

Consider the size of the other floating menaces in this tiny but crucial Panjim’s Mandovi water-front, and this is why this column has been in the past warning of the potential danger. Of this, more next week, but for the moment consider the Goa Tourism Development Corporation’s own Santa Monica which is 33.5 m long, while the pleasure cruiser owned by Swastik Cruises is rather long at 43.5 m. Shall we say a disaster of Titanic proportions is waiting to happen?

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