Two years ago, on March 18, 2019, the 47-year-old PRAMOD SAWANT, an ayurvedic doctor-turned-politician, had the difficult task of stepping into the very big shoes of Manohar Parrikar, who had passed away the previous day. At the time, the BJP was in a minority in the Goa government, Sawant had no administrative experience and no one to guide him, the other two influential leaders—Laxmikant Parsekar and Rajendra Arlekar—having lost the state election two years ago. Goa’s economy was already precarious, after the Supreme Court cancelled 88 mining leases in February 2018, inflicting an annual loss of Rs 1,000 crore since then. The arrival of Covid-19 in March 2020 dealt a further blow as national and international travel restrictions hit its other mainstay—tourism. Goa’s debt has risen from Rs 12,395 crore in March 2017 to Rs 18,444 crore by December 2020. Sawant also took flak for reducing the annual parental income criterion for the popular Laadli Lakshmi scheme (in which a girl child gets Rs 1 lakh when she turns 18) from Rs 8 lakh to Rs 3 lakh in October 2020. With India’s highest per capita income, Goa (counter-intuitively) has a higher number of people above the income threshold than below the revised lower income threshold. There is also the dispute with Karnataka over the Mhadei’s water, as the state’s diversion of the river is said to affect its flow in Goa. Environmentalists are up in arms over a number of government projects they say will benefit the coal-mining business at the cost of the state’s ecology. Yet, Sawant soldiers on as he presides over a BJP government that now has, for the first time in the party’s history in Goa, 28 of the state’s 40 MLAs. In an exclusive interview with KIRAN D. TARE, Sawant outlines how he proposes to overcome the spate of crises. Excerpts:

- PRAMOD SAWANT

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