Margao: The Aam Aadmi Party has submitted a memorandum to the fisheries department as well as the Benaulim panchayat asking them to handover the prawn hatchery project to local fishermen in the village. This comes after the fisheries department issued an expression of interest for a PPP setup to restart the facility for a state-of-the-art prawn and fin fish hatchery.
AAP handed a memorandum to the minister and director of fisheries stating that the local fishermen community of Benaulim was better suited to run the project. The memorandum was signed among others by the party convenor Elvis Gomes and was also handed over to the sarpanch of Benaulim by AAP youth leader and ZP candidate Hanzel Fernandes. Party general secretary Pradeep Padgaonkar along with Mario Cordeiro also met the Director of Fisheries and placed the party’s demands before her.
Fernandes said that the party was not in favor of handing the project to a private party. “AAP has reservations about handing over the project on PPP basis to any project proponent. The people of Benaulim are capable of converting the project into a ‘world class facility’ as desired by the government. The people of Benaulim are the rightful stakeholders of the place and we demand that the panchayat should adopt a resolution in support of the demands placed forth by the party,” he said.
Padgaonkar meanwhile who handed over the memorandum to the Director of Fisheries said that someone in the government was taking advantage of the current situation arising out of the pandemic and trying to make money by handing over the project to a private partner. He said AAP would be carefully watching the developments in the days to come as the government had lost trust of the people due to rampant corruption even during the pandemic.
Earlier this month, the fisheries department had issued an EOI to setup a shrimp and fin fish hatchery on a Public Private Partnership (PPP) to redevelop the existing hatchery spread over 10 acres with the private party having to design, build, finance and operate the project on a long term basis. The facility had been used as a pilot prawn hatchery in the 1990’s but was then closed over a decade ago.
This week, fishermen belonging to the Niz Ramponkaracho Ekvott also submitted a proposal along with a proposed plan based on a tripartite agreement between them, the private party and the government.