e last comment may be off the mark. As I later learnt
from Papa himself, the project was conceived from a
broader vision. Throughout the Konkan, from Ratnagiri district
in Maharashtra to South Canara (now Dakshin Kannada)
districts in Karnataka, no English-language daily was
available before noon or afternoon those days. While
the Mumbai dak editions of Times of India (ToI) and
Indian Express (IE) did the honours in coastal
Maharashtra, it was Bangalore's Deccan Herald in
coastal Karnataka. Goa's NT, which took only a couple
of hours less to reach Margao, could not be expected to
travel beyond its borders on mass circulation basis --
till WCT arrived, NT was in fact believed to have
pegged its circulation (to avoid re-classification to a
higher bracket, which implied higher minimum wages to
staff and workers!)

It was Papa's dream to fill this void of a morning
English-language daily for the entire Konkan, from Goa.
Hence the West Coast in the newspaper's name.
Competition to NT was only incidental. (I am not aware
of any family feuds among Goa's mining magnates at the
time and shall stand corrected if there was any such
raison d' etat. If there really were any differences
between the two families, they would be buried some
years later: under blessings of the Partagal Swamiji,
Papa's grand-daughter, Pallavi, was given in marriage
to the Dempo headman, Vasantrao's son, Srinivas -
current Chairman of the Dempo group.)

The infrastructure put into place to realize Papa's
dream matched. A modern civil construction,
meticulously designed, was put up at Davorlim, just
beyond Margao's municipal boundary. Editorial,
advertising and printing departments were housed under
one roof for optimum synch. All sections of the
newspaper's production process, from subbing to
typesetting, from proof reading to optical processing,
from plate-making to the final printing, were so
located as to achieve maximum production speed.
Attention was paid even to minor details, like sending
galley proofs to the news desk in a jiffy. Such were
the conveniences that the edition could go to bed by a
leisurely 4.30am (the print run took barely half an
hour.) Communication lines were made as reliable as
possible, given frequent power interruptions. Both PTI
and UNI ticker services were subscribed to (though only
the PTI had a carrier station in Margao to cope with
breakdowns.) A full-fledged bureau was set up in
Panjim, connected to the editor