https://www.livemint.com/economy/why-anxiety-is-high-in-india-s-smallest-state-11638978871499.html
There was considerable trepidation when registrations opened for the 52nd edition of the International Film Festival of India on 20-28th November. The previous edition, planned for the same time last year, was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Then, almost immediately after a much smaller replacement was held a few months later, the “second wave” devastated the country, hitting Goa especially hard. Nobody knew what would happen this time around. Would the festival flop? Was anyone going to show up? By the evening of the 20th, the answer was clear as can be. The festival inaugural ceremony was thronged to the rafters. Afterwards, for the first time ever, all four cinemas screening the opening movie (it was the world premiere of *The King of All The World* from Mexico) were filled to capacity. Large numbers of delegates were left seatless and irate. After two more days of unstoppable crowds from around the country – some 600 cinephiles travelled in from Kerala alone – the state government permitted festival organizers to lift social distancing requirements. Thousands proceeded to pack into IFFI from early morning to late night. Everyone partied like it was 2019. So far, so good. That potential super-spreader went off without any perceptible ill-effects on Goa’s Covid-19 scenario. Tourism industry stakeholders were jubilant, anticipating an excellent high season in December and January, and expecting huge pent-up demand to make up for all their losses over the past 22 months. Ever since the first nationwide lockdown was imposed in March 2020, they had experienced a catastrophic decline in revenue, with arrivals plummeting nearly 75% from the record highs of over 8 million visitors in both 2018 and 2019. The next two months were meant to restore vitality and life in a vital sector that contributes the second largest share to the state economy after pharmaceuticals, and all that seemed inevitable right until December 1. There were tons of bookings already in hand. Room rates were surging to the best they have ever been. And there was an extensive slew of charter flights scheduled to jet in from several different countries starting at the end of the month, filled with the kind of international tourists Goa likes best of all. All that buoyancy has disappeared overnight. Every bit of giddy optimism that buoyed IFFI into an incredible party has quickly evaporated to nothing in view of the spectre of Omicron. Now, everyone is on tenterhooks all over again, dreading this fresh tryst with the unknown. Could the new variant shut down travel here, as it has in other parts of the world? More fundamentally, can Goa regain any kind of trust in its government to handle pandemic protocols, let alone another potentially serious outbreak, after living through extraordinarily painful months earlier this year when hundreds of citizens died due to abject mismanagement of oxygen at the Goa Medical College treatment facility? Nobody in the state has forgotten how the High Court was moved to apologize in frustration: “We are very sorry. We failed collectively. We owe an apology to all the people.” At this juncture, the public mood is poised at a knife edge. On the one hand, everyone wants the tourism industry – by far the largest employer in the state – to make up for time lost due to the pandemic. But there’s also unanimity that Goa cannot afford the kind of free-for-all that sparked the second wave. The bottom line is no confidence at all in the government’s competence, under the notably hapless chief minister Pramod Sawant, to either enforce safe behaviour from tourists, or capably manage any health emergency that might arise from opening up despite Omicron. It feels like Catch-22, and high anxiety in India’s smallest state. “Our industry has been on the ventilator since the second wave,” says Maria Suzette, the proprietor of Panjim’s 24-year-old award-winning, landmark Mum’s Kitchen restaurant. One year before the pandemic began, she had opened another outlet in the North Goa village of Assagao, but “with the lockdowns, we were burning capital at a rapid pace, and had to wind up in that location. There is no ‘work from home’ for us in the food and beverage business.” Suzette describes what happened in Goa when initial lockdowns were lifted as “revenge tourism.” She explained, “no one is saying to close the borders, but we need strict vigilance. Allow only fully vaccinated visitors. Enforce the standard operating procedures. Everyone seems to be good at making rules, but making anyone follow them is much more difficult. What is happening is that we are getting tourists from around the country who act as though they have been set free from all controls, which is a nightmare.” A perfect illustration of what Suzette is describing plays out every evening very close to her restaurant in the pleasant waterfront neighbourhood of Miramar, in the capital city of Panjim, where hordes of budget travellers stream on to the beach at sunset without any heed to pandemic protocols. The beleaguered lifeguards are under constant stress, trying to manage far more people than they are capable of handling, with no one paying heed to their attempts to encourage masks and social distancing. “The situation seems to be getting more and more grave by the day,” says Prajal Sakhardande, head of the History Department at the nearby Dhempe College, and a renowned heritage activist. “I am very much concerned and worried for my students due to this renewed threat from Omicron, because many of them are too young to get vaccinated. Due to the upcoming elections [note: Goa goes to the polls in February 2022] our government is busy only horse-trading and buying MLAs. They are least concerned about our lives. I am very worried. We are left in a vulnerable situation.” Some kilometres up the Mandovi riverbank from Miramar, very close to where the casino boats are clustered together in a blaze of neon lights, Chryselle D’Silva Dias’s family has been facing the brunt of the anything-goes tourism model imposed on Goa. “We have to deal with belligerent people at all hours,” she says, “I have spent many nights calling the police at 3 am. In the mornings, we are often treated to piles of broken bottles, foil food packets and plastic bags with leftovers. Occasionally, we'll also find human excrement.” “No one expects tourism to be put on hold,” says Dias. “But this government really has to do more in terms of crowd control, and reducing the numbers of people congregating at various places, or even entering the state. We need to be more proactive about protecting locals, and also visitors. At the moment there is no monitoring of any kind. Given how rapidly the second wave accelerated, I feel that the adequate lessons haven’t yet been learned. At the moment, it’s just business as usual.” It is a fact there was mounting disillusionment in Goa about the way tourism has been comprehensively bungled, long before the pandemic caused so much distress and desperation. This is because, right into the new millennium, there were about a million annual visitors, whose impact was more or less contained to one coastal strip in North Goa. But those relatively sustainable numbers began to skyrocket after 2010, when the total spiked above two million. In 2013, they went over three million. In 2014, above four million. After that it has been a non-stop runaway train in one direction only. More and more domestic tourists, far fewer foreigners, huge environmental destruction, rampant illegalities in real estate and construction, and piles of garbage everywhere. In 2018, after the total number of visitors peaked above eight million for the first time, the late chief minister Manohar Parrikar sparked much angst by promising there would be fifteen million before too long. In that same year, Parrikar’s cabinet minister Vijai Sardesai ignited a national controversy when he complained, “today we have almost six times the population of Goa coming as tourists. They are not top-end tourists, they are also the scum of the earth. Are they responsible? They are not. If you compare Goans to the rest of India, we are high in per capita income, social and political consciousness, we are much superior than the people who are coming in. Those people, how you will control (them)? Can you control them?” Unpalatable and politically incorrect as Sardesai’s comments may have been, they struck a chord with his fellow Goans, because many domestic tourists do tend to behave in ways they would never get away with at home, or any destination abroad. Always an irritant, those kinds of behaviours are highly alarming in pandemic circumstances, because they can quickly turn fatal, as happened earlier this year itself. “Where are the checks,” asks Alu Gomes Pereira, the industry veteran who has seen it all in the hospitality business in Goa since 1979. At this point, he’s not at all optimistic: “I am in tourism, and I want tourism, but not like this. There are no controls at all. It has become a joke. Forget about business, what about the lives of the people in Goa?” Gomes Pereira lives in a gorgeous heritage home, on a street named after his grandfather, adjacent to a postcard-perfect street which is one of the most photographed in the country. All that is much less idyllic than it sounds, because, he says, “we are mobbed here! Noisy, no masks, throwing waste the whole time. It’s a free-for-all. We don’t need these kinds of tourists. I don’t believe this government has any capacity to manage the situation. I am sorry to say we are heading straight for destruction once again.” The irony in the big picture that Gomes Pereira describes is, of course, that even while the situation is indeed quite bad in Goa, masses of Indian urbanites are dead certain it’s still much better than where they live. This is why the tiny state’s real estate marketplace is saturated to capacity in an astounding pandemic-times boom, and flights are sold out all through the next two months. Zoom into the details of what is happening in individual establishments, and you can see some of the reasons why there’s actually very good reason that is happening. Maria Suzette’s Mum’s Kitchen, for example, maintains strict ISO 22000-mandated protocols and has fully vaccinated its entire staff. More recently, she has implemented web reservations to allow sequencing, and avoid crowding. Her clients are very happy to feel safer than they can anywhere comparable in their own home cities. It is much the same at the wildly popular Black Sheep Bistro, which has cemented its place ranks in the top 10 restaurants in India. Here too, the staff is trained to carefully maintain pandemic precautions, and, as a result, they have become even more popular than before Covid, especially with many of the new settlers in Goa. “Business has returned to normal,” says Sabreen Sukhthankar, who owns and operates the venture with her husband, Prahlad. “It has been so important to get back there, especially in an economy like Goa that has such a large part of its population that depends on the tourism industry for its daily bread.” To find out more about Goa’s tourism prospects in the age of Omicron, I reached out to Nilesh Shah, head of the Travel and Tourism Association of Goa, the apex body for stakeholders in the state. He told me “it’s very clear that Covid is here to stay. The new normal will be living with the virus. Waves will come and go. But we’re in a much better situation than last year, because of the prevalence of vaccinations.” Shah regrets there’s so much unnecessary panic about the new variant, saying “here in Goa, we have learned to a certain extent how to do business with Covid around us. We will stick to those lessons. It is a dynamic situation, but I feel confident we will resolve it.” Thousands of lives and livelihoods, and the fate of an entire industry rests in the balance. Note: the published version is slightly different from this original text, and is behind a paywall (thus the attached PDF),