A year after I moved to Goa in 2021, I encountered the IT Park Road in my quiet neighbourhood. I first found it on Google Maps while trying to navigate to a lovely, but mysterious, plateau that everyone else seemed to know about. You can trace the route, and drive through the steeply ascending, rapidly narrowing road. But what you cannot do is actually go to the IT Park, because it doesn’t exist.
The park was announced in 2023 by state IT Minister Rohan Khaunte on the sidelines of the G20-StartUp20 Engagement Group meeting, as part of the state’s plan to house 200 startups and establish Goa as a global tech destination. This noble enthusiasm, however, seems to have stalled. As of this year, the government is still conducting feasibility studies, while scouting for a partner to build-operate-lease–transfer the cluster. IT Park Road, meanwhile, leads you straight to the plateau, which serves as a home to cobras, dogs, and, at least, a couple of games of cricket.
The IT Park isn’t the only thing that arrived with a bang and then trailed off with a whimper. At the start of the pandemic, digital nomads became the unstoppable force arriving in Goa in droves from Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi. Four years on, they have met with an immovable object, the reality of life in India’s smallest state.
Disillusioned
Since 2020, Goa has been at the centre of India’s digital nomad story, a promised land where remote workers could trade their expensive city apartments for beachside living, while keeping their metro salaries. The influx was dramatic: It permanently transformed rental markets, spawned co-working spaces and restaurants helmed by celebrity chefs, and drove prices up exponentially, much to the distress of local Goans.
Now, some of these remote workers are leaving their sunshine dreams behind. They are questioning whether the infrastructure — physical, social, and regulatory — ever existed to sustain them in the first place.
Ajinkya Chikte, who runs a marketing business, first moved to Goa in late 2019, and almost immediately, found a 2 BHK flat in Assagao with a swimming pool for Rs 17,000 a month. Around 2020, home-delivery of groceries via apps like Instamart had just kicked off in Goa, so Chikte had all the conveniences of the city, without the cramped spaces and terrible AQI. Then the conveniences started disappearing.
After a year in Barcelona, Chikte returned to find that Assagao “had turned into GK 5”. Since 2023, he has moved through several neighbourhoods in search of peace and quiet that continue to elude him. He first moved to Siolim, where — thanks to several other remote workers who moved to the area — power cuts and traffic jams became routine. Chikte moved further north, settling in remote Pernem.
There were no other houses around, but there was also no waste disposal or running water. The farm behind his house would burn their plastic waste every other day. “Once the guy set fire to a tarpaulin sheet that burned for six hours straight,” Chikte told me. He got into a cycle of chasing water, which had to be pumped via a borewell, which couldn’t function without a steady power supply.
Chikte eventually moved to Divar Island, but had to contend with taking the ferry across the Mandovi every time he had to dispose of his solid waste. He had two internet connections and two power backups. “I would routinely hear excuses like, the ‘undersea cables have been eaten away by crabs,’” he said. “My overheads to make remote work happen were really shooting up.”
The one thing that Chikte cherished was the ability to be close to nature. Now, he said, if he wants to do a clean trek, he has to go 2-3 hours away. “About two years ago, I used to trek to a place that we’d discovered by following streams upwards,” Chikte said. “We would take garbage bags and bring whatever refuse we found with us. Eventually, the trash became too much for us to manage.”
Chikte has now moved to Bali, because Goa has become “almost as expensive as Bombay, thanks to people like us”. “Goa is too small to accommodate too many of us and our urban demands,” he rued. “Everything that made Goa worth the inconveniences has been ruined by us.”
Also read: India’s digital nomads fleeing big cities for work-bliss balance. New hubs want them, woo them
‘Minor inconveniences’
Sonali Kokra, a writer and founder of a young jewellery business, left Bangalore for similar reasons. Covid had helped her reassess life and she had hit certain financial goals. In Bangalore, she felt like she was meeting the same person over and over again: Everyone talked about VC, valuation, funding, startup, raising salaries, and ESOPs. “Life in Bangalore meant that I had to own a lot, I had to be a lot,” she told me. “I constantly felt like I was in competition with God knows who, and losing that competition. I had a lovely house in Bangalore and no time to live in it.”
She felt like she was fundamentally changing in these cities. “I thought, ‘Is this who I am? And if this is who I am, I don’t want to be this,’” she said. In September 2023, after years of feeling an affinity for Goa, she made the move.
Moving to Goa offered Kokra the chance to reconnect with the person she used to be. She’d find herself at the beach two or three times a week. She started walking, reading, and daydreaming again — things she had stopped doing in Bangalore.
But the day-to-day reality, unsurprisingly, proved difficult. Kokra told me about an Ikea cupboard she’d brought with her that, two years later, is still in its box because she’s been unable to find a reliable carpenter. With her car, it took two months for the garage to tell her what was wrong with it, and another two months to potentially fix it. “I had to install my washing machine on my own, instead of waiting on someone. These are not big things but they add up,” she said.
The larger problem was running the jewellery business. Kokra said she has struggled extensively with sending and receiving couriers. “You can’t run a small business that way,” she said. “If I had a partner, in life or business, to take some of the load off me, I wouldn’t leave Goa. But just navigating everything on your own makes the small challenges feel insurmountable on bad days. And when your business is young, there are many, many bad days.” Kokra is now moving back to Mumbai, but with the acknowledgement that the frustration of day-to-day reality lands only when you get used to the beauty of Goa. “You know you are in a good place when minor inconveniences become the most important thing in your life.”
For Joel Louzado and Mohanavalli Shankar, the breaking point came with a pregnancy. They moved to Goa from Bangalore in 2021 when Shankar got a job with a company headquartered in the state. Louzado’s family is Goan, so it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar territory. Life felt manageable… until Shankar got pregnant. The couple had to ride a bike for half an hour on a highway to get to a gynaecologist she was comfortable with.
“The first three months of pregnancy were really brutal,” Louzado said. Even with help from relatives, they couldn’t sustain being in Goa. “You’re in an unfamiliar place where you can’t book an Uber in an emergency. Even a minor thing can escalate into a major emergency and that feeling is ever present in your day.” As soon as it became feasible, they flew to Coimbatore, and now reside in Bangalore with their young daughter. But every time Shankar visits Goa, she wishes they could move back. “We now have a large network of people who are practically locals, who we can rely on,” Louzado said.
‘Location independence’
Networks, it turns out, are the difference between enduring Goa and leaving it. S, a 27-year-old writer who moved to Goa from Noida in 2023, loves much about the slowness of her life here. In Noida, she lived on the 23rd floor and had no idea who lived above or below her. “I was so dissatisfied with my life there, I was constantly looking for distractions,” she said. “Goa expanded my capacity to sit with myself, because my options for distraction are limited.”
But that lack of distraction cuts both ways. “I didn’t expect that the dating pool would be this small,” she said. “Goa is a lover’s world. If you have found a partner, you can move here and build a very beautiful life.” For a young person, however, the experience can be very isolating. For two years, she couldn’t find a single good person to date, “unless you want to date travellers who are like butterflies.”
The transience makes everything harder. Two of her close friends have left Goa this year, and S is toying with the idea too. “The anonymity of the city doesn’t exist here,” she said, and that’s both liberating and suffocating.
I wouldn’t call these experiences an exodus, but they are definitely a recalibration. Will these departures affect real estate or cost of living in Goa? According to reports, North Goa has experienced a decline of 15 to 20 per cent in hotel tariffs and long-term rental rates. This is market normalisation, far from collapse. The demand for independent villas and attendant amenities remains strong.
Maybe, the seductive idea of “location independence” has been subject to a reality check. Because working from paradise, it turns out, needs more than just good vibes. It needs reliable power and crabs that can leave undersea cables alone.
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 Aamaan Alam Khan)
Garbage … These are minor.ets talk about the flipside and the major bs of living in a city… Where to even begin?!