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The rectification was made possible due to an amendment in the Goa Town and Country Planning Act 1974, passed by the Goa legislative assembly this January, barely six months after the new Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government headed by chief minister Pramod Sawant took oath, which gave the government executive powers to make changes in the decadal “regional plan” if the claim is made that they are “inadvertent errors”.

Except that those that designed the regional plan in the first place do not believe this was an “inadvertent error” at all. Architect and urban planner Dean D’Cruz, who was part of the 11-member team that drafted Goa’s regional plan in 2011 that is now being corrected, is adamant that there was no need for any rectification in Morjim. “The seven plots are not contiguous with existing settlement areas. With being over 60,000 square metres, these are not minor in nature. The plots fall between no-development slopes and forested areas,” D’Cruz said.

Any land with an incline of 1:10 or more is considered a hill slope and also a “no development” zone.

The outrage notwithstanding, on May 25, two further changes plots were “corrected” — a verdant 4,000 square metres (sq m) paddy field in the vicinity of the capital city of Panaji, and an 16,500 sq m orchard in the coastal village of Salcete were also notified to be “settlement” land.

Goa’s Town and Country Planning (TCP) minister Vishwajit Rane has doubled down on the claim that the “green zones” marked on the plan were a “mistake” and “an injustice to our people”. He said his department was in the process of changing 60 million sq metres of land from “green” to “settlement”. “Large properties and settlement lands, some belonging to poor people, have been converted from settlement to natural cover, orchards, and non-development slopes in the name of rationalisation, depriving them of their right to put their land to developable use,” Rane said in a statement.

Meanwhile, this debate has now turned the spotlight to a series of amendments made to the Goa Town and Country Planning Act over the past five years which experts say dilute safeguards and introduce discretionary powers for the executive who can now make changes to Goa’s maps.

On the other hand, the debate also captures a growing conflict in Goa — between the desire to retain the state’s “character”, and this unique character creating a massive surge in demand for new housing as people from other parts of the country look to migrate to the state or set up holiday or retirements homes there, boosting the state’s economy.

Between January 2019 and 2023, official records show that 156,674 sale deeds for immovable property have been registered, averaging around 39,000 sale deeds per year including pandemic years. By comparison, the number of sale deeds registered for three years between 2012 to 2015 stood at 44,717 — an average of around 15,000 per year.

Experts say that post the pandemic, a time when people have started to re-examine their lives in packed urban sprawls, the demand for space in Goa has grown. K Kulashekhar, a real-estate agent in Goa, says that over the past three years, the sector has seen property prices rise between 40% and 100%, with premium properties rapidly selling out. “The demand is essentially for premium villas and gated complexes while the mid to budget sector has been priced out,” Kulashekhar said.

Land is a scarce resource in Goa with environment minister Nilesh Cabral, in a recent statement before the Goa legislative assembly, revealing that only 9.25% of the state is available for “growth and development”.

“Out of the total geographical area of 3,702 sq km of Goa, the state is hardly left with just 342 sq km area (only 9.25%), which can be made use for growth and development. The rest is Forest (Protected/Reserve/Private) including National Park & Wildlife sanctuaries amounting to 1,250 sq kms or 34.63% of Goa, Coastal Regulation Zone which amounts of 400 sq km or 10.8% of Goa, water bodies including rivers, lakes which is 216 sq km or 5.32%, and agriculture land which is 1,480 sq km or 40% of Goa,” he said.

Land rates, especially along some coastal villages, range between ₹50,000 to ₹60,000 per sq m, while in rural Goa depending on the “zoning” of the land, rates range from ₹10-12,000 per sq m up to ₹40,000 per sq m for settlement land.

According to global property consultant Savills, Goa has become a favourite destination for people planning to buy second homes due to high rental yields and the ease with which they can be offered to hotel aggregator websites for short-term stays for high returns.

Changes in the act

Between 2018 and 2023, several amendments have been made to Goa’s Town and Country Planning Act, which governs urban and rural planning and development in the state — all of which have served to dilute its provisions and introduce discretionary powers to officials and planning boards. The amendments include one in 2022 that gave the government powers to create zoning plans in rural towns and villages currently not covered under “planning areas”. With this amendment, planning authorities have been given powers to draw up “detailed development of specific areas for housing, shopping centres, industrial areas, civic centres, educational and cultural institutions” and decide on “comprehensive land allocation of areas or zones for residential, commercial, industrial, public utilities, agricultural and other purposes”.

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Activists say this amendment gives the executive a “wider range of powers” to expand Goa’s high-density zones and effectively “take away the holistic, consultative planning process” and allegedly replace it with a system of deciding planning areas “based on commissions”.

“Basically the changes are being made to suit the builders’ lobby and the speculators. They are destroying the eco-sensitive zones of Goa the zones that play an important role and help us cope with climate stresses, leaving us at the mercy of the vagaries of nature, similar to what happened in Uttarakhand,” said Sabina Martins of the Goa Bachao Abhiyan, a civil society collective.

The chief town planner at the Goa Town and Country Planning department did not respond to requests for comment.

Another amendment to the Act in 2020 saw mining and quarrying exempted from provisions of the planning Act. The amendments made these two activities exempt from being in conformity with the regional plan, and from otherwise prohibited activities including slicing and burying agricultural lands. Mining activities can now override green areas of Goa’s regional plan.

But perhaps the most controversial of these amendments was carried out in 2018, allowing the government to “make such changes in such Regional Plan as may be necessary” based on “a written request from any person” seeking a “change of zone of his land”. Such changes, the amendment states, could be carried out “at any time” provided that they had prior approval of the government and were notified to the public. Prior to this, changes to the decadal regional plan could only be done via “revisions” which meant redrawing the map at a holistic level and not plot by plot changes based on individual requests.

The Goa government informed the legislative assembly that it received 6,239 requests from landowners since January 2019 to January 2023 that the “zoning” of their land be changed.

According to data submitted before the high court of Bombay at Goa in 2021, “most of the zone changes imply converting agricultural land for settlement purposes”. The data said 94% of all changes sought were for converting agricultural land (including orchards).There were also claims that sought the conversion of “natural cover” or non-notified forest land to settlement; a change which would open up these areas for construction.

Changes outside the act

This is in addition to the loss of agricultural land and natural cover that Goa has already seen through changes in Regional Plans. Goa’s orchard lands which once comprised 23.15% of the state in 1986 reduced to 15.58% of the state by 2011 while cultivable land fell from being 19.32% to 13.38%, when one compares the Regional Plan 2001 (drafted in 1986) and the Regional Plan 2021 (drafted in 2010-11).

D’Cruz said the system of allowing changes in land zoning to allow large-scale development based on “who wants to build what, where” is not only against the spirit of equitable planning but threatened to overburden a village’s limited resources with higher urban density than it has the capacity for. “When one thinks of planning, one needs to consider the overall needs of the village. The kind of resources that are available in the village as well as an equitable planning process so that everyone can benefit and not just particular landowners,” D’Cruz said.

Speaking at the launch of The Great Goa Land Grab, a book about changes in Goa’s land-use over time in February this year, Peter Ronald de Souza, who was co-director of the Lokniti Programme of Comparative Democracy at the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, said “market factors” were the driving force behind the changes. “What we are witnessing is a transformation in the nature of land. Land has moved from being an instrument of production to a commodity. As a commodity it now becomes available for sale. It has no other value as production, as agriculture or horticulture or even culture,” De Souza said.

The changes are taking effect on the ground with apartment complexes and villas dotting the landscape in what were once wild hillsides. “Ten years ago, Census 2011 revealed that 21% of houses in the state were empty. Since land zoned for settlement has continually increased – even after 21% of the habitats are lying empty – it is legitimate to ask why every government pursues land conversion and who actually benefits from this,” said Solano da Silva, a researcher who has been tracking Goa’s land use changes and who co-authored the The Great Goa Land Grab.

Real-estate developers, on their part, have welcomed the changes. “We at CREDAI see this as a positive sign and believe that this will give a boost to Ease of Doing Business. The amendments are proactively devised by taking inputs from industry associations and other stakeholders,” Avez Shaikh, the secretary of CREDAI-Goa, said.

Still more changes

The Goa Land Development and Building Construction Regulations 2010, a set of rules that determine what kinds of construction can be allowed in each zone, are also being amended. In late April, the department of Town and Country Planning issued a notification in the official gazette notifying a draft of the proposed changes and seeking objections and suggestions from the general public. The proposed changes will allow for yoga and meditation centres, open air sports, religious structures, and agricultural research centres etc to be set up in agricultural lands -- lands that include salt pans, khazans (low lying paddy fields), fish farms, mudflats, and orchards among others.

The existing regulations allow agricultural zones to be used only for agricultural, forestry, and fisheries. Other activities permitted are only those ancillary to agriculture such as irrigation, pump installations, biogas plants, farm houses, poultry, dairy and roads for agricultural purposes only.

“The subject amendments propose to allow numerous massive constructions for non-agricultural uses within ecologically sensitive zones in violation of the land use restrictions,” Abhijit Prabhudesai, an activist said. Similar changes sought to be brought in a previous version of the amendment were hastily withdrawn after public pressure in September last year.

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The Opposition has attacked the government on this issue.

“These changes completely negate participatory process to planning as enshrined in the constitution and are being made only to secure the interests of the builders lobby and not the people of Goa. As a consequence of these changes, the heritage and character of Goa will completely change,” Congress leader Elvis Gomes said.

The government has reasoned that the changes were being brought about because the current regulations were “too restrictive” and that the changes were being introduced in part because “other states have other uses permitted in agricultural zones” and that “farmers need to be able to live on their lands”. It has also said that an expert committee will review all cases individually.