Ground water woes
Diana Pinto
With reference to Wachasundar’s statement that Goans consume 100 litres of water each day as against 20 litres actually needed. The following needs to be clarified :
Goa used to be a land endowed with an abundant natural pure ground water. Village wells served the needs of the community well.
  Then came successive governments, who put up industries without planning how their water requirements were to be met with. The State Pollution Control Board abdicated its responsibility based on an undertaking demanded by them that each factory would manage their own industrial and other waste generated by it. This resulted in an assault on the ground water table by various factories through borewells.
 The TCP and the Village Panchayats are  issuing NOCs to large building projects, without having a sewage and garbage disposal system in place, contributing to further pollution of the ground water table and the environment.
Now at the IWWA conference, Chief Minister Manohar  Parrikar has confirmed what we Goans have feared all along – that “e coli levels have increased and that the ground water is getting polluted by heavy metals, the reversal of which can take centuries.” If the authorities did not have the requisite infrastructure for governance in place, they certainly had no right to indulge in unregulated so called “development”.