By Vaman S. Sankhalker
On Wednesday night, the Vasco Sunday Market became an inferno. Hundreds of small shops selling clothes, bags, utensils and shoes, packed shoulder to shoulder, burned while their owners watched stock worth crores vanish. It happened just as Diwali approaches, when shelves are fullest and a year’s hopes are stacked inside them. Our sympathies are fully with every trader who lost his livelihood. The cause is yet to be ascertained, and the Hon. Chief Minister Dr Pramod Sawant has promised to see how best to compensate them, which is welcome.
But sympathy is not a plan. Two questions deserve an answer. If this were my shop, what would I get back? And why are hundreds of shops allowed to stand so tightly clustered that one spark can finish them all?
We love to call Goa Lord Parshuram’s Bhumi, a land largely spared the floods, earthquakes and cyclones that batter other states. There is truth in that. But fire does not read scriptures. Barely an hour before the market blaze, a car accessories shop near Tilak Maidan was gutted, with a short circuit suspected.
The deeper problem is awareness. Ask a dozen shopkeepers in any Goan market, and most will say they have no cover, or that they bought a policy once and never read it. Many do not know that shop insurance can protect against fire, burglary, theft of stock and cash, broken glass and signage, and even loss of income after a shutdown. Nobody told them, and few asked.
Let me tell you about a factory fire in 2008 at Tuticorin, TN. The loss was ₹18.5 crore, and the insurer paid about three-fourths. The gap had nothing to do with the fire. The owner had insured his machinery at the ‘depreciated value’ in his books, not at replacement cost. A machine bought for ₹10 lakh, booked at ₹7 lakh and costing ₹12 lakh to replace, fetched just ₹7 lakh. Multiply that across a shop floor. A small extra premium would have covered it, but he learned this only while preparing the claim.
The moral: insurance is risk transfer, not tax reduction and not a formality. A policy that cannot rebuild what you lost is a comforting piece of paper.
So what does it take to insure a shop? Less than you fear. Typically you need:
• A filled proposal form and KYC
• Trade licence and GST registration
• Premises details: construction, area, use
• Stock statement or purchase invoices, plus a list of fittings and equipment
• Previous policy or claims history, if any
The premium depends on construction, the goods stored, location and the sum insured. For most shops it is a small fraction of a percent of the value covered, often less than the festival decorations. Get more than one quote, and ask which risks each policy includes, since packages differ.
Check three things before you sign:
• Value: insure stock at current replacement cost. Under-insurance can mean the insurer pays only a proportion, even on a partial loss.
• Income: a loss-of-profit add-on matters, because rent and salaries do not stop while the shutters are down.
• Fine print: read the exclusions before the fire, not after.
Stallholders in municipal markets: the building may not be yours to insure, but your stock, fittings and income are. Cover them.
Insurance repays a loss. Prevention avoids it. Goa needs to declutter its crowded markets, with gaps between rows, lanes wide enough for fire tenders, safe wiring, alarms, working extinguishers and trained staff. In a cluster, one careless shop endangers hundreds.
Forums like GCCI, Vibrant Goa and other trade chambers could make this a regular agenda item. We celebrate success stories there. We should also study disasters, so we do not repeat them.
Every shop here was built from scratch, with determination and hard work. That journey should not end in a single night.
The golden rule: when in doubt, over-insure rather than under-insure.
(The writer is a young faculty at a Technical School in Goa)
