Real estate market is waging a war against Goa’s soul

Representational image: A street in Goa | Pixabay

In Goa, you are always within earshot of a conversation about real estate.

At the grocery store, brokers with AirPods stroll the aisles, extolling the virtues of a paddy field, lake or river-facing villa, with the word “luxury” appearing as many times as the square footage calculations. Inside centuries-old Goan homes, now transformed into tony little cafés with chic lighting, upper-class Delhi and Bombay people gather with their open MacBooks and groan about the Delhi and Bombay people taking over their apartment complexes. Along winding village paths, first carved by cattle finding their way back home, morning walkers pass each other with competing complaints: the modest fortunes their ancestral land fetched, or how these sales are disrupting the state’s ecology and culture.

This is more than just the commodification of paradise. As the real estate market chases the next Assagao or Aldona, we are witnessing a battle for Goa’s soul, playing out in every conversation, every transaction.

This battle plays out first in colour. In Goa, “green cover” has a new meaning. Where paddy fields lined by coconut palms once stretched toward the horizon, green construction nets now flutter against the sky, each one promising another luxury villa or gated community. No one is as attuned to this change in visual language as Ashika Nadaph, an architect whose studio, VAN, renovates old Indo-Portuguese houses. She remembers a time when Goa attracted artists, intellectuals, writers, and those seeking alternative lifestyles, but the pandemic has accelerated an influx of people who “still want the metro life, but from a distance”.

“Gentrification is inevitable, but it is not as problematic as gated communities,” she tells me. “In a standalone house, you are still a part of the fabric of that village. But there is no interaction with your surroundings in these huge apartment complexes.” Nadaph is referring to the traditional Goan home, which was premised on connection. Its balcãos – raised porches with built-in seating – invited neighbours to pause for a chat. Inner courtyards created shared spaces where extended families could gather. These architectural gestures find no echo in today’s self-contained complexes. Behind high walls, each apartment becomes its own island, complete with amenities that eliminate any need to engage with the village beyond.

The architecture of isolation, perfected in urban apartments, has found new ground in Goa. It’s a fundamental rewiring of spaces and relationships, where the very definition of home – both for those who’ve lived here for generations and those seeking to create new roots – is being rewritten.

Erosion of Goa’s zoning protections

To understand how Goa arrived at this crossroads requires backtracking to 1986, when this smallest of Indian states made an unprecedented choice. Professor and researcher Solano Da Silva, in an article titled “The making and unmaking of Goa’s unique alternative urbanity” writes that, unlike other states, Goa engineered protection into its policies, creating legally binding zoning plans that recognised the delicate balance between built spaces and ecology. This foresight gave Goa its distinctive character. However, the erosion of these protections started soon after, in 1988, with the first “relaxations” granted to select land parcels, resulting in haphazard development.

Recent amendments to the Goa Town and Country Planning Act – first Section 16B, then Section 17(2) – opened the floodgates. In just two years, between 2019 and 2020, over 23 lakh square metres of land sought conversion. By 2023, another 23 lakh square meters were in line, much of it asking to transform ecozones into settlements. “From June 2024 onwards, over 4,42,000 square metres have been sought to be converted by re-zoning agriculture and natural cover into settlements,” writes Da Silva.

I’d call this overheating, but really, it’s a blaze running through Goa’s real estate market, with no signs of abating. In my very quiet neighbourhood, far from the upscale coastal belt, luxury villas are priced in the region of Rs 3-4 crore. Around the beaches of Anjuna, land has appreciated by almost 1,000%. Nadaph, who moved to Goa because it was relatively affordable, tells me that land that was priced around Rs 8,000 per square metre is now available for Rs 35,000-40,000.

It’s an elemental recalibration of what land has come to mean, from something that once sustained community, to something that must generate a return on investment. The pandemic is often considered the great accelerator of this change: Dominic Viegas, former General Manager of Operations at Riviera Goa, a real estate company, noted how villa values surged by 200% in 2020 alone.

But for those who’ve watched this market closely, like early retiree Charles Victor, this was less a sudden fever than the inevitable progression of a longer shift. Every other market plateaus after an escalation, he tells me, “but Goa is like a magic trampoline that has only gone up.”

The state first became the dream destination for India’s urban escapists in the late 1990s. Entrepreneur and celebrity astrologer Naveen Khanna, who has been investing in Goa since 1997, remembers how the state’s permissive spirit first captured our imagination in the early 2000s. Young Indians, seeking refuge from joint families, found an idyll in Goa. This was further spurred on by “Vijay Mallya’s legendary parties” and Bollywood’s winter migrations, which spilled across Page 3 supplements, painting Goa as India’s only playground of possibilities.

Over the last decade, Victor said, Goa has offered buyers the quickest churn on investment, thanks to the infrastructural foundations that were laid to cater to tourism during the 1970s. “There is no place in Goa where you can confidently say that demand is not going to surge,” Victor said. This also means that an oversaturated North will inevitably yield to South Goa, where smaller pockets continue to open up.

South Goa, however, having witnessed the sprawl in the North, is fighting the toughest battles (although these concerns are alive and well in the North too). Civil society groups like the revered Goa Foundation and organised local residents spearheaded the #SaveMollem movement a few years ago. More recently, the people of Loliem and Poinguinim villages have petitioned the environment ministry to include them in the upcoming Eco-Sensitive Areas notification, protesting a proposed film city due to come up on a laterite plateau.

Reimagining where and how Goa grows

These concerns often crystallise into a fraught insider-outsider narrative, but the reality flows deeper than such simple divisions. Viegas pointed out that for local residents, it is impossible to compete with cash-rich buyers from Delhi and Gurugram, who can afford to pay Rs 70,000-80,000 per square metre of land that was priced at Rs 7,000-8,000 a few years ago. When the state’s residents resist new developments, they’re not just opposing change – they’re also mourning the erosion of a way of life where land held meaning beyond its market value. Yet, as Khanna said, it’s a complex “love-hate relationship” that defies easy categorisation. The same people who protest against gated communities might have benefited through land sales. It’s a constant tension that plays out in daily interactions.

Perhaps the path forward lies not in choosing between preservation and progress, but in reimagining where and how Goa grows. Rushil Palavajjhala, a real estate expert and urbanist, pointed to an often-overlooked possibility: deindustrialised zones, like the Zuarinagar stretch between Verna and Dabolim, which hold the potential for thoughtful development. “These spaces have already been shaped by human intervention,” said Palavajjhala, and can absorb the pressure that now bears down on Goa’s villages and ecological treasures like hill slopes and khazan lands. An area like Zuarinagar, he pointed out, is only 25 minutes from both Panaji and Margao, and 10 minutes away from a coveted sea view.

The future of Goa can no longer lie in the endless parcelling of its paradise, but in reimagining what makes a place truly valuable. Palavajjhala suggests that the answer may rest in diversifying beyond land – in creating high-quality jobs for Goan residents that could match Bengaluru or Mumbai salaries, and in nurturing a knowledge economy that allows Goans to thrive without selling their inheritance. When land is no longer the only currency of progress, the conversation would shift from who belongs where to how different dreams of belonging might coexist.

This can also help preserve the very qualities that first drew people to Goa’s shores. Shifting the burden away from Goa’s land will ensure we can measure wealth not just in square metres, but in the capacity of a place to sustain both its heritage and its future.

This article is part of the Goa Life series, which explores the new and the old of Goan culture.

Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant)