Panaji: The mandate was ambitious, with a grand promise to transform Panaji into a modern urban city through a Rs 1,100 crore Smart City Mission. The seductive pitch for state-of-the-art infrastructure, seamless digital monitoring, revamped sewerage networks and better drainage promised residents smart living.Instead, after nearly two years of trenches, barricades and dust, Panaji today stands as a masterclass in urban misdirection and traffic chaos, and a case study on how hundreds of crores of public money appear to have dissolved into crumbling concrete, missing files and broken promises.Infrastructure completed barely two years ago under the banner of Smart City Mission has rapidly fallen into disrepair. Pavements and stairs in Altinho, laid down with fanfare, are either cracked or overgrown with weeds. The smart roads, pitched as model urban corridors across the city, remain more akin to a concept. Underground utility ducts remain limited, while smart sewerage networks struggle to contain basic overflows during the monsoon.“The money has gone down the drain. It should have been about what the people of Panaji require and not what govt requires. Our pavers have started coming out. They just dug the road, put a sewerage line, and some lines are not working. At some colonies where the sewerage chambers are higher than the colony, the sewage water is flowing into the colonies,” said former mayor Surendra Furtado.At Ribandar, the sewerage pipeline has been laid, but the network remains incomplete and unutilised.The drainage story is equally troubling. A sum of Rs 41 crore was allocated towards the rejuvenation of the historic St Inez nallah, a crucial natural storm-water artery. Today, the channel remains choked with silt, plastic waste and stagnant water, raising troubling suspicions of duplicated works and unverified billings.Elsewhere, the ledger shows Rs 123 crore spent under the combined banner of smart roads, electricity and sewage, alongside Rs 16 crore split evenly between smart water pipelines and smart meters. Despite these substantial investments, Panaji’s residents still await what should be a basic civic right: uninterrupted, 24-hour clean water supply. Instead, dry taps and low pressure remain the daily baseline.The crumbling facade of the Miramar beachfront development project undertaken by IPSCDL provides further evidence of “wasteful expenditure” that has collapsed.CCP councillor Jack Sukhija has questioned the purpose of several of the beautification projects and said that future interventions along Goa’s beaches should prioritise environmental protection over extensive concretisation, alleging that the Rs 12.8 crore Miramar project had deviated from the original objective of coastal protection and resulted in wasteful public expenditure.The financial paper trail reveals significant expenditures with little tangible impact on daily life. Over Rs 4.3 crore was funnelled into consultancy fees, yet the physical yields of this expert guidance remain elusive. A princely sum was earmarked and spent on a network of smart CCTV cameras for a surveillance network, but that has done little to solve traffic congestion and haphazard parking along the city’s arterial roads.RTI records covered expenditure of only about Rs 500 crore on projects, and audit reports exist only up to 2019 for a mission that began in 2015. Even the Rs 23.5 lakh booked under AMRUT cannot be traced to clear outcomes.“Goans were promised a Smart City,” said Congress RTI department chairperson Uday Chari, “not a maze of missing files”.The fundamental crisis of Panaji’s smart city experiment lies in the collapse of operational ownership. The special purpose vehicle was created to build projects, but it was never meant to run the projects. Faced with the upkeep of these projects, the civic body and the state are now in a tussle to inherit the assets.“The Smart City Mission should have been given to CCP and there should have been a technical team within CCP to execute the works. Does CCP have the funds today to maintain these projects? Who is going to maintain these projects?” asked Furtado.What is symptomatic of the total apathy towards maintenance of the smart city projects can be seen in the state of the Rs 2.5 crore mangrove boardwalk behind the central library, which fell into disrepair before it was handed over to CCP.IPSCDL officials did not respond to calls or queries about the concerns raised.
