By IANS,
Panaji : The Goa state cabinet will Wednesday decide whether or not the hundreds of thousands of tourists hitting Goa’s beaches this season can sip their cool beers or eat spicy fried prawns in beach shacks.
The Goa cabinet is expected to spell out its much delayed shack policy, amidst protests from shack owners. This after the Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority (GCZMA) ruled out early allotment of shacks on beaches earlier this month, claiming that pounding of sand under the feet of hundreds of thousands of tourists was resulting in erosion of the popular beaches.
“The shack policy will be put before the cabinet Wednesday. This will bring relief to all the parties involved. We have found an answer to the shack owners’ woes in the policy,” Goa Tourism Minister Dileep Parulekar told reporters in Panaji.
Annually, 300-odd shacks operators are allotted with the help of a lottery system a licence to operate beach shacks for six months. These 300 are in addition to other “permanent” or traditional shacks which have been existing at popular beaches for the last several decades.
This year, however, an order issued by GCZMA and a petition pending with the Bombay High court in Panaji, has derailed the process of shack allotment, citing environment degradation along the state’s immensely popular coastline.
According to Cruz Cardozo, convenor of the Shack Owners Welfare Society (SOWS), the move to delay the allotment of shacks using beach repairs as an excuse is “silly and hypocritical”.
“If the pounding of beaches causes erosion and degradation of the beaches, then the government should ban five-star hotels too and stop charter tourists from coming in,” Cardozo said, adding that the five-star hotels lobby were in cahoots with the government behind the move to delay allotment of shacks.
“The five-star hotels do not wants tourists to come to our shacks and eat cheap and good stuff. By keeping us away from the beaches, they just want to make more money by killing competition,” Cardozo said.
The 300 thatched beach shacks are spread across popular beaches like Anjuna, Baga, Calangute, Candolim, Colva, and the like, and are often the only source of food and drinks on the sandy stretches.
Over 2.6 million tourists hit Goa’s beaches annually, out of which half a million are foreigners.