Goa Land crisis: 66 Lakh Sq. m. of Green Spaces Vanishing to Real Estate Boom

The Hindu

07-07-2025

Published : Jul 07, 2025 18:30 IST - 12 MINS READ
From the roof of the Our Lady of the Mount Chapel in Old Goa, one can see a really long way. In a single sweeping glance, one can follow the Mandovi river from the salt pans of Ribandar to the historic churches of Old Goa—the first Portuguese settlement in the region. Along the way, one would also spot the expanse of the Kadamba plateau, the idyllic islands of Divar and St Estevam. Once lush and green, this landscape is now pockmarked by rapidly expanding patches of concrete.
When contrasted with historical satellite imagery and the memories of long-time residents, this landscape tells a stark story about Goa's tryst with the 21st century. It is the story of a terrain once defined by vast paddy fields, dense forests, and innumerable water bodies, now steadily being transformed into a faithful recreation of the suburbia in India's metro cities, replete with gated communities, garbage-lined roads, traffic jams, water shortages, and polluted air.
Over the past two decades, development—largely in the form of a real estate boom—has become a seemingly unstoppable force in India's smallest State. And yet, in many ways, it also appears inexplicable. According to the 2011 Census, Goa had a massive housing surplus: about 1.25 lakh homes were unoccupied at the time. Since then, the State's population has only grown by 1.38 lakh, according to its latest Economic Survey. In other words, even today, Goa does not have enough people to fill the houses that already existed 15 years ago.
Nevertheless, starting in 2017, the State government has championed a series of legal provisions through which it has attempted to convert an estimated 66 lakh square metres of ecologically sensitive land, previously off-limits to construction, into settlement land. That is roughly half the area of Mapusa, Goa's fourth-largest city.
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These efforts have primarily taken the shape of three successive amendments to the Town and Country Planning (TCP) Act, which governs land use in Goa. With citizens' groups and environmental activists opposing each of these measures—and the courts siding with them—a cat-and-mouse game has ensued. Section 16B, enacted in 2017, was challenged in court in 2018. A 2019 interim order prevented the government from finalising any proposed conversions. In 2023, Section 17(2) was passed. This amendment, too, was challenged and ultimately stayed by the courts in April 2025. Section 39A, which was added in 2024, is the subject of an ongoing PIL petition.
All these amendments essentially serve the same purpose: they enable the state to convert protected land into real estate opportunities. The government claims that these measures are intended to correct inadvertent errors in Goa's master plan for land use. Activists allege that they enable rampant corruption—a rot so deep-rooted and lucrative that it plays a significant role in deciding who gets to rule Goa.
Losing forested patches
Old Goa is often described as the city of seven hills. Our Lady of the Mount, as its name suggests, sits atop one of them. Immediately adjacent to it is another hill that is perhaps the last major forested patch in the area, which remains largely untouched by development. Glen Cabral, a businessman and activist based in Old Goa, recalls spotting hornbills in its canopy recently. These majestic birds used to be a common sight in Goa but are becoming increasingly elusive due to habitat loss.
This patch of forest, too, may not last much longer. In December 2024, the TCP Department approved an application by Enigma Properties Pvt. Ltd, a Delhi-based company, to convert a large section of the hill into settlement land. The property spans 1.6 lakh sq m, roughly the size of 23 football fields.
Cabral, along with over 500 Old Goa residents, filed a letter with the TCP Department objecting to the conversion on multiple grounds: parts of the property lie within the legally mandated 100 m buffer zone around the chapel, which is a protected monument; the property lies within the influence zone of Carambolim Lake, a protected wetland; the property contains slopes that are considered restricted development zones; and a railway tunnel passes underneath.
'They have unobstructed views of the Mandovi from here. They can build a commercial or residential building and make a lot of money,' said Cabral. 'But constructing on this hill poses a serious risk of causing landslides. The railway tunnel already cracked once, in 2021, due to heavy rain. If you obstruct the flow of water downhill, it could happen again. And it will affect the water levels in the Carambolim Lake as well.'
The size of Enigma's property magnifies the threat its conversion poses to heritage structures, biodiversity, and public infrastructure. But this is not an isolated case, far from it. Villages across Goa are witnessing a surge of land conversions that threaten to overwhelm existing ways of life.
Village layouts under threat
The village of Chopdem lies sandwiched between a river and a densely forested hill. Its 1,000-odd residents have, over generations, occupied about 2.8 lakh sq m of land. In the past two years alone, the TCP Department has sought to create 3.4 lakh sq m of additional settlement land in the village using Section 17(2).
In Mandrem, a popular tourist destination, there is a proposal to convert over 3.15 lakh sq m of land under Section 17(2) and Section 39A. In both villages, it is the forested hills that are primarily under threat of conversion.
'There's a natural logic to how the spaces in Goa's villages have been arranged,' said Tahir Noronha, an architect and urban planner who is doing his doctoral research on the politics of land in Goa at the University of California, Berkeley. Villages are often strategically situated between hills and low-lying fields in order to protect them from the heavy monsoons. When it rains, the vegetation on the hill slopes traps some of the water, while the rest flows into the fields via the village. 'I fear that these policies will erode that natural logic. If you build on the hilly slopes or the low-lying fields, you risk landslides and floods.'
The large tracts of new settlement lands are largely created to feed the real estate industry, which serves wealthy investors from India's metro cities. 'There is no need, no demand from local people for all this construction. They are building for luxury's sake, as second homes,' said Cabral. 'People are coming here from Delhi because the air is unhealthy there. But they don't realise Goa is also becoming like that because of all this construction.'
The additional burden created by these settlements on Goa's already stretched public services is likely to directly impact the quality of life. 'The government needs to consider the carrying capacity of a village before approving new settlements,' said Vinit Sawant, a resident of Mandrem who has been opposing land conversions in his village. 'Goa is a small State. How much will you fill it? If we carry on like this, whatever is special about Goa will be gone. It will be like any other place in India.'
Sawant recalls climbing the forested hill that towers over Mandrem when he was a child. Now, the hill is being encroached by a series of villas and apartments. 'We used to play in the jungle, collect fruits,' he said. 'The Goa I grew up in, it came from my grandfather to my father, and from my father to me. My son is 4 years old. I want to keep that Goa alive for his generation also. Development is needed, but in the name of development, you cannot cut all the hills and the jungles and develop every single corner.'
First State to have plan for land use
In 1986, Goa became the first Indian State to adopt a statewide plan for land use. This plan classified every inch of the State into a variety of zones: forest, orchard, agriculture, industry, settlements.
'The unique landscape of Goa has a lot to do with zoning,' said Solano Da Silva, Assistant Professor of Development Studies and Politics at BITS Pilani, Goa, who has been involved in research and activism on land in Goa for close to two decades. 'When you do zoning, you are opening up some area to development, and you also are demarcating no-go areas.'
The first regional plan, notified in 1986, lacked precision. However, in 1988, under the pretext of rectifying errors in the plan, the TCP Department introduced the system of 'spot zoning', which allowed individuals to request changes to the zoning of specific properties. In Da Silva's view, this practice gave 'enormous discretionary power' to the TCP Department, and as a result the TCP Ministry emerged as 'a lucrative portfolio'.
Between 1988 and 2005, the TCP Department converted 1.2 crore sq m of eco-sensitive green cover to settlement. The practice ended in 2005 when Goa was under President's Rule. The then TCP Secretary, Jayshree Raghuraman, warned that the practice had led to 'haphazard development' and should be stopped. But the scrapping of spot zoning in 2005 would prove to be a brief moment of calm before a raging storm: this was roughly when, for the first time, interest in Goa's real estate began to really heat up.
'India's economy was liberalised in 1991. It took around 10 years for the landlord castes to pivot into real estate, and it was in the early to mid-2000s when the industry started to peak,' explained Noronha, citing the research of his thesis adviser, Sai Balakrishnan, who is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley.
Wholesale changes to masterplan
Over the next decade, spot zoning took a back seat as successive governments led by the BJP and the Congress attempted to respond to the increasing demand for settlement land by directly making wholesale changes to the master plan. As a result, Goa ended up with the Regional Plan 2021, the master plan that remains in place to date, which added a staggering 8 crore sq m of settlement land over the 1986 plan. That is roughly equivalent to the combined area occupied by Goa's two largest cities, Panaji and Vasco da Gama.
The regional plan was enacted in 2011. And despite the massive increase in settlement land, the demand continued to rise. By 2017, spot zoning had returned with the advent of Section 16B. When the courts blocked its usage, Section 17(2) followed. And even before the legal challenge to Section 17(2) could be resolved, Section 39A was introduced.
On August 5, 2024, TCP Minister Vishwajit Rane said in the Assembly that 'there is no question of low-lying fields or no development slopes [NDS] being touched under 39A'. Yet, an analysis of the 270 conversions that the government has approved so far reveals that 23 per cent of them were originally zoned as NDS and around 15 per cent were low-lying agricultural land.
'These laws provide a route through which people with a lot of power and influence can do whatever they want,' said Noronha. 'It's all done in a very shady manner. We don't see minutes of the meetings; we don't see proper reasoning given for why these properties are allowed to be converted.'
Noronha alleged that there is rampant corruption involved in these land conversions. 'The government collects massive fees for converting a property, which is the white money fee. I've been informed by multiple people that there's a further black money fee, which is more than double that,' he said.
In his view, real estate developers are willing to pay both the official fees and bribes because the potential profits are enormous. Essentially, they buy cheap agricultural or forested land, convert it, and sell it as premium real estate.
Consider this striking example: a plot in Anjuna, mostly zoned as orchard land, was bought in December 2022 for Rs.74 lakh. It was converted under Section 17(2) in March 2023 and sold to a Delhi firm in June for Rs.6.8 crore—fetching over 800 per cent return on investment in just four months.
Political class and benefits of conversions
Noronha alleged that Goa's political class, across party lines, benefits from this system of conversions. In September 2024, Vijai Sardesai, former TCP Minister and head of the Goa Forward Party, sold a property he owned in the village of Seraulim to Pallavi Dempo, the BJP's candidate for South Goa in the 2024 general election. The property, which had been originally zoned as agricultural land, was converted six months before the sale. Going by the government's base rate for agricultural land, the property would have been worth Rs.63 lakh before conversion. The final purchase, after rezoning to settlement land, was billed at Rs.29.42 crore.
Frontline reached out to Rane for his take on the allegations of corruption in land conversions, but he declined to comment.
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According to Da Silva, the money-making potential of the TCP Ministry is so huge that the question of which party gets to govern Goa is often linked to who gets to become TCP Minister. 'Because Goa has zoning, and the demand for land from real estate and tourism is high, the person who can provide exemption from zoning can make millions, and so can the party or coalition in power,' he said. As a result, politicians with the power to make or break governments, tend to covet the TCP Ministry.
Goan politics has, for a long time, been characterised by unstable governments and defections. But of late, political parties have used 'land ministries—those empowered to alter zoning—to poach MLAs, engineer defections, reward defectors, and cement political coalitions', said Da Silva.
'Every TCP Minister in the recent past, going back to 2017, has been a defector and has been the most important coalition partner,' he said. 'He will never ditch your government as long as he is allowed a free hand to rezone. And if you remove him from the TCP, your government will collapse. The result has been disastrous for Goa's ecology and has derailed hopes for an economy that is oriented towards ordinary residents of the State.'
Visvak is a writer and editor, mostly of narrative non-fiction. They are co-founder of India Ink, a public history project that seeks to make academic knowledge about Indian history more accessible @indiainkhistory