Chief Minister Pramod Sawant announced on Wednesday that the Goa government would lay the foundation stone for the proposed Indian Institute of Technology-Goa within six months, even though a suitable site for the campus hasn’t been found in nearly a decade.
Sawant’s comments come at a time, when farmers and tribals residing near the proposed site at Sanguem in south Goa, a sub-district which borders Karnataka, were protesting the setting up of the campus at the cost of their land.
Sawant, on Wednesday, however argued that the government was not introducing a “red industry” at the location, but an educational campus, which would provide jobs and employment opportunities to the local residents.
“It is a piece of land where nobody has cultivated anything for nearly two decades. There is encroachment of government land by people who have started stone quarries and illegal activities. This is not development of a village, it is merely development of those who are involved in these (illegal) activities,” Sawant said at a public function on Wednesday.
“We are not getting a ‘red’ (hazardous) industry here, this is for education purposes. I appeal to those who are opposing the project. They should withdraw and submit their land documents to the Collector for compensation,” Sawant said.
The Sawant government finalised the IIT campus at Sanguem sub-district earlier this year, following a long history of debacles which successive BJP-led governments faced, in wake of protests at other sites, where IIT-Goa had been previously proposed.
Goa was allotted an IIT by the central government in 2014; the elite institute has been functioning since from a temporary campus shared by the Goa Engineering College and the National Institute of Technology in Farmagudi village, in south Goa.
In 2020, the BJP-led coalition government zeroed down on Melaulim in north Goa, as the site for the IIT campus, after two other potential locations in Sanguem and Canacona had to be abandoned following protests by local residents, who alleged that a land scam orchestrated by ruling politicians in the identification of the campus location.
In January last year, the Goa government was forced to scrap the IIT-campus at Melaulim, after protests by local villagers turned violent. Villagers from Melaulim and adjoining regions claimed that land acquisitions were conducted in haste while identifying the campus site at Melaulim. They had said it would leave several local residents homeless and deprived of their ancestral land.