ANDAs evening settles in, a handful of villagers gather outside a yellow-painted temple in Goa’s Palem village, about 10 kilometers from Panaji, the state capital. They discuss crumpled land maps and copies of documents from the Department of Regional Planning (TCP).
The lanes of Palem come alive with color ahead of Shigmo, Goa’s spring festival. Banners adorn the village side by side with “Save Palem Siridao village; say no to rezoning (39A)” and in Kokani, “Amchem udak amka zai (Our water to us)”.
Among the group is Vasu Kankolikar, 42, who says, “Several objections, proposals and appeals were made to the TCP but they rejected us. If we don’t fight them, our green canopies will slowly turn yellow, then red and they will sell it to make it grey.” Mr. Kankolikar is a resident of Palem and a former sarpanch.
He was one of at least 2,000 who sat in protest from February 21 to 27, moving from Palem to Panaji’s Azad Maidan, the site of previous protests over the law. Palem falls into the constituency of St. Andre, one of the 40 seats of the Goa Legislative Assembly. Viresh Borkar, an MLA from the Revolutionary Goans Party, along with others went on a hunger strike and also protested outside TCP Minister Vishwajit Rane’s house in Dona Paula, less than 10 km from Panaji. Rane is part of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been in power in Goa for 14 years. Mr. Rane did not respond to inquiries.
The protest, and several similar ones over the past two years, was against Section 39A of Goa, which came into effect under the Town Planning (Amendment) Act, 2024. The section allows for the conversion of ecologically sensitive zones such as forests, hills and agricultural land into settlement zones. According to Goans, it will open up green spaces for real estate development, disrupt the ecology, damage the livelihood of people like fishermen and plunge the state into civic chaos. Goa is a collection of 320 inhabited villages (2011 census) in two districts with only one city, the capital Panaji.
“The problem with Section 39A is that it destroys the concept of planning. Every property owner is now the planner of their land and can decide what they want to build,” says Norma Alvares, a lawyer and environmental activist based in Parra. “The Regional Plan (2011) was designed to protect Goa’s ecology, with 83% of the land classified as ecologically sensitive. While the Regional Plan identifies 17-18 categories of ecologically sensitive zones, Section 39A recognizes only seven.” For example, areas of orchards that are considered ESZ-2 under the zoning plan, where only limited development is permitted, can be converted under Section 39A. The ESZ-1 areas according to the spatial plan prohibit any development completely.
In 2018, the Goa Assembly passed an amendment to the TCP Act that brought in Section 16B, which allows the Chief Town Planner to change a zone in a regional plan. This was canceled in 2024 due to intense criticism. Meanwhile, Section 17(2) was introduced in March 2023. This allowed private owners to convert land they had bought by applying to the TCP department to “correct” any “inadvertent errors” in the regional plan. The owners could do this without public consultation. The Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court read the amendment in April 2025.
“Section 39A came up in February 2024 and took the legacy of land grabbing further,” says architect and regional planner Tahir Noronha of Neura village. He collected data from the Goa Government’s Gazette and found that applications had been submitted to the TCP department to convert 68 million square meters of land in Goa into settlement areas. Of that, 13.6% have already been unlocked, he says.
Land locked
The strike ended on February 27. The protesters say Chief Minister Promod Sawant has told them he will suspend land conversion proposals under the TCP Act for the St. Andrew. He also reportedly said that the three FIRs filed against the protesters would be scrapped. “The FIRs are not scrapped yet,” says Manoj Parab, a protester who was summoned to the Panaji police station.
The FIRs, filed between February 21 and 26, named Parab, Borkar, Kankolikar and 1,500 unnamed people, citing “illegal assembly” and missing documents from the TCP office. “If they are identified, there is a possibility that some will lose their government jobs or be transferred far from home,” said a man in his 20s standing in a group outside a temple in Palem, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Mr. Borkar says, “Our aim is to scrap 39A and introduce a Person of Goan Origin (POGO) Act favoring local people. We also want laws to restrict the sale of agricultural and forest land and the Goa Panchayat Raj Act to define the scope of mega projects and approvals related to it.”
In Palem, Tushar Gawas, 28, a resident, points to a pond and the hills beyond. He goes through the documents on his phone and points out that there are applications in the TCP office to convert 84,137 m2 of land into settlement plots. “So far 5,000m2 has been approved and converted in Palem under 39A. The maps of the entire regional plan will be colored orange and show settlements instead of green cover,” says Mr Gawas.
Goa residents stage a protest against land laws at Azad Maidan in the capital Panaji for a week in February. | Photo credit: Dhiraj Gauns
This means that individuals or companies can buy land and apply for conversion, allowing for the construction of residences or commercial properties. The analysis shows that Pernem itself – near the Manohar International Airport – has 10.2,000 sq mts provisionally converted into a residential area. So far, North Goa district is more affected by the zoning changes than South Goa, data from Noronha shows.
“Basically, 39A allows big people to move without villagers’ consent. What people want is to discuss these projects in our Gram Sabhas. If a builder wants to bring a project to our village, that builder has to come to the Gram Sabha instead of making an agreement at the ministerial level,” says Mr Noronha, stressing that 39A is mostly requested by big real estate companies.
He says rezoning began in 1988. From then until 2006, the government added approximately 1.4 million square meters of new settlement. In 2006, a new regional plan was created. “Villagers noticed that several villages were converted into a settlement in this plan, which led to one of the biggest public movements, the Goa Bachao Abhiyan,” says Mr. Noronha. The plan was flagged after protests.
A complication in Goa’s land laws was the Code of Communidades, a Portuguese-era document created in 1933 dealing with community-owned land that could be leased. After independence from colonial rule in 1961, the code ran parallel to the laws governing the rest of India.
“Many current decisions ignore these original plans of the Comunidade and treat such lands as if they had no established use. The confusion stems from a regional plan that has been in force for more than a decade without a clear transition to a new land use framework. This has led to temporary mechanisms such as 39A becoming permanent solutions,” says Elsa Fernandes, architect-environmentalist.
He says terms like ‘occupant’ and ‘tenant’ appeared in land records after 1961. “Forms I and XIV under the Goa Land Revenue Act reflect occupation and do not establish ownership, which has contributed to long-standing confusion over land titles and transactions in the state,” he says.
All for the view
Glen Cabral stands on the crest of a hill in the village of Ella, looking out over the Mandovi River. Behind it is the chapel of Our Lady of the Mountain. Pointing to plots announced to be converted from orchards, he says: “People are buying views at the cost of environmental destruction. Do they realize that soon there will be no views left in Goa due to construction at this rate?”
Old Goa – of which Ella is a part – is spread over seven hills in the northern part of the state. The area has at least 2.6 lakh sq m of land proposed for rezoning, according to the Goa Gazette. In Ella, requests for land conversion amount to about 1.6 million m2. Parts of this land fall within the Carambolim Lake Wetland Impact Zone and the Our Lady of the Mount, 16th century chapel buffer zone. The villagers have filed an objection with the TCP against a Delhi-based construction and engineering company that bought the property on the hill. The company requested to discuss the plot.
“Bison were rarely seen; we never saw leopards in Goa. We can easily spot them now. These are signs that their homes are being encroached upon,” says Mr Cabral, adding that sightings of exotic birds are now rare. A railway tunnel passes under the hill.
Carrying cargo
At Candoli, 15 km from Ella, in Badrez taluka, applications are being accepted to convert 29,764 sq m from an orchard, nature reserve and crematorium area into a residential zone by an individual, as reported by the Goa Gazette. The Calangute Constituency Forum (CCF), a Candoli-based civic body, opposed and opposed the change, with CCF member Agnelo Barreto leading the signature campaigns.
“Part of the area is near the Aguada Lighthouse and Fort, which are designated as a cultural monument, and the plateau is designated as a disaster management area. These violations are damaging the local ecological balance. At least 50 trees are cut on the hillside,” says Mr. Barreto, looking at a map of Candolim from the TCP department.
Arpora village, also in Bardez taluka, and Chimbel in Tisawadi taluka also have similar problems. “There is a reason why these forests are protected. This hill and its forests provide ecological services to people. They are a buffer against pollution, they anchor the soil and protect biodiversity. You cannot privatize a public hill and build a gate and deploy security. If the hills are not stabilized, soil erosion is likely to occur and the area may be prone to flooding,” says resident Susana Hill along the base of Kos, Supora, a gate installed at a site that locals say, that it is a public way to climb the hill.
Chimbel is 20 km from Arpora, where villagers went on strike for 45 days in January against the government’s plans for the 17-storey Prashashan Stambh building and the nine-storey Unity mall to be built near the lake, a source of water for farmers in the nearby region. “They suspended the project. But were these projects needed? Does the village have the carrying capacity?” says Govind Shirodkar, chairman of the Biodiversity Management Committee, the person selected from the panchayat to represent the village’s environmental interests.
Goans mostly have a problem with commercial interests in communal lands and ecologically sensitive zones. “Section 39A brings in people who have no relation to the country or its people. They want swimming pools for every bungalow. When foreigners come to Goa with the intention of turning it into Delhi or Haryana or wherever, the village collapses completely,” says Ms Alvares.
“The problem with section 39A is that every property owner is the planner of their land and can decide what they want to build.”Norma AlvarezLawyer and environmental activist
