Last week, the Goa Legislative Assembly passed the Goa Escheats, Forfeiture and Bona Vacantia Bill, 2024 after a brief discussion in which the Opposition sought to point out lacunae in the Bill and the government defended the bill saying that it has been brought as a result of the recommendations of the one-man inquiry commission that was set up to probe land grabbing cases in the State.
According to the Bill, “where any person dies intestate and without leaving legal heirs according to his personal law, the property of such person shall automatically stand transferred to the Government and “on such finding of fact by the Competent Authority, the Government shall become the owner of the property without any further act or document.”
The government will appoint a competent authority to conduct an inquiry to ascertain whether such deceased person has died intestate and whether he has left any legal heirs if the competent authority is satisfied that the deceased person has died intestate and without legal heirs and that prima facie it is a case of escheat, he will publish a formal notice calling upon all persons who may have any claim to the property to appear before it and put up a claim within three months.
Claims will have to be decided within four months and thereafter, and any person aggrieved by the decision of the Competent Authority under Section 6 may prefer an appeal to the Appellate Authority within three months. The Bill prescribes a similar procedure for abandoned and unclaimed properties and public auctions, and forfeiture if no rightful claimant comes forward.
While the intentions of the government seem noble and born out of a desire to offer a legal regime to deal with fraudulently sold properties for which there are no claimants, the law appears to suffer from several misconstructions. Anyone familiar with Goa’s landscape will be aware of the several types of land and landowners in Goa. These include Comunidade lands, temple and church-owned lands, land owned by landowners (Bhatkars) now owned by Mundkars via the Mundkar Act as well as lands given away via grants for agricultural purposes such as Alvara lands etc.
Many of the lands currently owned and occupied by private parties and individuals initially belonged to the Comunidades and were handed over by way of Aforamento or other such means to build residential houses to the Gaoncars and shareholders of the Comunidade. Ideally, once a beneficiary of such Comunidade Aforamento dies leaving behind no heirs, the land should revert to the Comunidade and not to the government, which has no role in the management or administration of Comunidade lands, the Comunidades being autonomous institutions.
However, the Bill, which is soon to become an Act, makes no mention of such nuances of land ownership in Goa and instead empowers the government to take over lands for itself and later auction them to the highest bidder. In the process, age-old institutions be they comunidades, sociedades, or church fabricas and temple mazania committees that originally owned the lands will see the government now empowered to take over lands that originally belonged to the institutions.
A bill of this nature needs a more broad-based consultation rather than just within the state cabinet and the Goa legislative assembly. It is incumbent on the government to begin this dialogue before the bill is sent for assent to the Governor.
