Panaji, May 6
The five glitzy offshore casinos
anchored in the Mandovi river, which are now contemporary landmarks in
the state's capital, will be shifted upriver to other locations, even as
an anti-corruption outfit claimed that five more casinos could soon be
given operating licences.
Speaking to IANS on the sidelines of a
tourism ministry event here, Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar, whose
Bharatiya Janata Party had vouched to rid Goa of casinos as a pre-poll
promise, dodged questions over whether his government would grant
licences to more casinos, in addition to the dozen-odd gambling
facilities already functioning in the state's five-star hotels.
Asked
to respond to a charge by NGO Generation Next that one more offshore
casino and four onshore casinos were in the process of being licensed by
the BJP-led coalition government, Parsekar said: "Not at all, at least
not in the Mandovi... Even we are planning to shift this in the interior
elsewhere".
Asked specifically if his government would grant
licences to more casinos, Parsekar cryptically said: "No additional
offshore casinos," refusing to comment on whether more onshore casinos
would be allowed.
Goa, one of the top beach and nightlife tourism
destinations in the country, first opened up to casinos in the late
1990s under the then Congress regime, which amended the Goa, Daman and
Diu Public Gambling Act, to provide licences to one offshore casino and a
string of five-star hotels.
In its 2007-12 stint in power, the
Congress once again granted licences to seven more offshore casinos, of
which only four now survive.
Additionally, nearly a dozen onshore
casinos operate out of Goa's five-star resorts. According to government
data, the onshore and offshore casinos annually contribute nearly
Rs.125 crore (approx $20 million) to the state's treasury.
Ahead
of the 2012 state assembly polls, the BJP, which had led a sustained
campaign against the casino industry for several years, had promised
that if voted to power, its government would rid the Mandovi river of
the casinos.
After coming to power, then chief minister Manohar
Parrikar and now his successor Laxmikant Parsekar however did a u-turn
on the promise made in the BJP poll manifesto, by insisting that the
casinos will have to stay put because of the quantum of revenue they
contributed to the state's coffers.
Soon after his appointment as
chief minister in November last year, Parsekar even said that doing
away with casinos would send a wrong signal to future investors of
casinos in Goa. The casino about-turn has been a subject of much public
criticism.
Last week, an anti-corruption NGO said at a press
conference that the BJP government was all set to grant licences to four
onshore and one more offshore casino.
"This is a fraud committed
by the BJP government with the people who elected this dispensation to
power," Generation Next president Durgadas Kamat said. The allegation
came a day after a spokesperson for the home ministry, the licensing
authority for casinos, said that a floating hotel with an in-house
casino had received in-principle clearance.
"The licence for the
floating casino is not a new one. We are only transferring an existing
licence to the floatel (a floating hotel, the first in the state) owned
by the same casino company," a home ministry official told IANS,
requesting anonymity.
Goa attracts every year nearly three million tourists, of whom several thousand account for the footfalls in the casinos.
(Mayabhushan Nagvenkar can be contacted at [email protected])
