Assagao has again opened a can of worms. The land mafia in collusion with unscrupulous officials is known to grab government and Comunidade. Now private properties are grabbed by manipulating archival and land records. Land grabbing gets easy when those at the helm of power have little moral authority.
When a highest police officer is accused of facilitating demolition of a house to help a landlady and the state home minister, is unable to act tough, it can’t get any worse.
How did we come to such a sorry pass? The crucial link is Goa becoming bustling holiday spot. A second home for the Northerners and belief that tourism can sustain itself without a thriving environment has brought Goa to where it is. The tourism industry only recognizes the number of ‘foot falls’ as a measure of growth. The importance of being eco-friendly and protection of delicate ecology of Goa has never been on their cards.
The Tourism department and the Town and Country Planning Department only believe in adding apartments, hotels and resorts rooms as development of modern infrastructure. The real estate sector which started off as building apartments and villas is now in the business of ‘service apartments’ where hundreds of such apartments are built not for residences but for renting out pushing the cost of apartments to a new high.
Thousands of apartments lying vacant but purchased by the rich and powerful who want to have a slice of Goa have made land a scarce commodity pushing the TCP Department to facilitate commercial exploitation of all eco-sensitive areas. That facilitation is such a lucrative area that almost all in the echelons of power are in that business. Just think of the number of Governments formed, brought down or retained by the TCP portfolio!
Rocky hillocks, low lying paddy fields, private and public forests, river and sea fronts which have their own bio-diversity value, have fallen to rapacious land mafia ably helped by those in power by directly changing laws or by looking the other way, as excavators drive in. Decades back, the underworld involved in murder, rape and extortion, with Karim Lala, Haji Mastan, Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan part of the Bombay Land Mafia. If someone asks, who is part of Goa’s land mafia, which names come to your mind? Here they are not part of the underworld but they all adorn Goa’s power structure. Russian land mafia and Israel drug cartel were spoken of, until a time when everyone in the power structure became part of land mafia.
After a long time I heard something sensible from Suresh Prabhu- ‘Goa is most loved and everyone wants to settle here. It’s become extension of Delhi. There is need of scientific study on Goa’s carrying capacity to protect the Western Ghats’. So nice, Thank you Prabhu for endorsing a view I have been pushing through O Heraldo.
Bali where tourism contributes to 80% of the economy, overcrowding, pollution, large scale land conversion and erosion of traditional culture have played havoc with the people and the state. In 1970, they came with a code that no new building can be taller than a coconut tree. That was to maintain ‘a sense of the place’. In 2010, chairman of the Bali Tourism Board Ngurah Wijaya said what Suresh Prabhu says “everyone wants to invest in Bali. Everyone wants to own accommodation in Bali. There must be some limitation”. In 2020, the Bali Tourism Board called for a moratorium on new hotel building and licenses. In 2023, the Governor Wnyan Coaster banned all tourist activities on all 22 mountains and volcanoes including Iconic Mount Batur and Mount Agung. The Governor was conscious of locals’ lives and livelihood intimately connected with the mountains and volcanoes but for him mountains are sacred and sacredness of Bali had to be preserved.
A 2018 report by Transnational Institute an Amsterdam based non-profit body found Bali’s 330% growth in the tourism industry unsustainable. 2020 saw the largest loss of farm lands in Bali’s history as 1200 hectares of farm land were converted to non-agricultural use. These cases raised the alarm bells in Indonesia.
Tourism cannot be permitted to wreck social injustice on the locals. In tourism states like Venice and Bali, locals are the worst sufferers. Few days back our tourism minister proudly spoke of one crore foot falls. He did not tell what is the state’s carrying capacity. He did not tell us how many million tourists can be tolerated in the tourism belt.
An audit of the number of rooms available in hotels, resorts guest houses and number of apartments and villas used for renting out and remaining unoccupied is the need of the hour. Without the dream project of special status, it may be difficult to restrict non-Goans citizens to buy properties, but pending such an audit and a study on the carrying capacity as proposed by Suresh Prabhu, a moratorium on licensing of building of new hotels and ‘service apartments’ is the need of the hour. That requires courage of conviction and freedom from real estate mafia. Can a government so dependent on a TCP portfolio master such courage?
Goa’s civil society has been raising alarm-bells over reckless conversions. The TCP Department itself makes mincemeat of its own regional plans and the land conversion policy to fuel the Real Estate demands and some of the country’s top legal brains engaged by the government, take valuable judicial time to persuade the High Court how 16B, 17(2) and 39A changes are good for Goa and legally appropriate.
Assagao is only a tip of an iceberg. The malaise cannot be solved by treating it as a law and order issue, though criminals who took law in their own hand have to be dealt with an iron hand.
(The writer is a practicing advocate and a political thinker)