Team Goemkarponn
PANAJI: Speaker Ramesh Tawadkar of the Goa Legislative Assembly explained on Tuesday that the terms of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), led by Congress MLA Altone D’Costa, and the Public Undertaking Committee (PUC), led by Leader of the Opposition Yuri Alemao, have not yet expired and that the meetings of both committees are still in effect as of right now.
The current panel will continue until the PUC is reconstituted in the upcoming fiscal year 2025–2026, even though the PAC’s term ends in February 2026.
Alemao, D’Costa, and representatives of the United Goans Foundation met with Tawadkar on Tuesday. They had petitioned the Speaker to dissolve the Committees, claiming that their time was over and they were still in the chair. The UGF delegation also requested action for any inefficiencies in the petition citing non-performance.
Following the meeting, both Congress leaders told reporters that their panels are legitimate, and the Speaker has affirmed this. Alemao added that PUC exclusively addresses the issues raised by the CAG.
On January 19, 2023, the Speaker announced the formation of several House Committees to them through Bulletin No. 18 (Part 1). All of these committees were in office from 2023 to 2024. This contained the Estimates Committee, the Business Advisory Committee (BAC), the panel of Presiding Members, and the two most significant committees, the PUC and the PAC, each of which had seven members.
For failing to prepare and submit reports to the Goa Legislative Assembly, the PAC and PUC have come under fire from all sides. The PAC’s leader, Quepem MLA D’Costa, “ignored” looking into frauds during the last ten years of the BJP government and failed to review several CAG findings in the allotted period.
From January 2023 to September 2023, the PAC and PUC did not convene at all, according to records from the Goa Legislature Department. With a ten-month lapse between January 2024 and October 2024, the PAC only convened eight meetings starting in September 2023.
In contrast, the PUC convened nine times, with its first meeting taking place in September 2024 and a four-month break between May and August.
