Chief Minister Pramod Sawant announced on Saturday that the State Cabinet had approved a draft Bill to be tabled in the upcoming session of the Goa Legislative Assembly that, if passed, will ban the sale of agricultural land to ‘non-Goans’ and non-farmers, a move that, according to the chief minister is aimed at preserving Goa’s agricultural lands from non-agricultural use and preventing its ownership from moving in the hands of outsiders.
On paper, the move is a progressive step that is long overdue for a state like Goa that has been rapidly losing its agricultural land to all other purposes including real estate complexes, scrap yards, marble selling yards, restaurants, plant nurseries and the like -- despite there being protections within the existing set of laws that makes such a change of use ‘illegal’.
Despite the illegalities happening in broad daylight, very little action has been forthcoming against the alleged violators and those within the government who allow these illegalities to continue unabated.
Besides private violators, the government has not set the right example by converting agricultural land for non-agricultural use. Across the state and more particularly in Margao and Salcete, it is evident that once fertile agricultural lands have been converted for non-agricultural projects like South Goa District Hospital, the Matanhy Saldanha Administrative Complex, the eastern and western highway bypasses and many other ‘development’ projects that have been built right through lands that are amongst the most fertile agricultural parcels of land.
Fertile land is a scarce resource, and while one can construct infrastructure projects on any kind of available land, one cannot, no matter how hard one tries, cultivate crops on rocky lands -- a simple principle that has been lost on the policymakers.
It is even more ironical that the Bill is being moved by the Revenue Department, whose minister Atanasio Monserrate, who throughout his and his family’s now two-decade ‘rule’ over the Taleigao constituency has unceasingly and unabashedly overseen massive tracts of fertile paddy land be filled and subsequently be handed over to the builders’ lobby where today massive highrises stand.
Monserrate has also consistently ignored persistent protests by a section of villagers over a large patch of land beside the panchayat that was mercilessly filled.
In this situation, It is unclear what difference yet another law will make. Goa’s experience tells us that while on one hand, successive governments have said and continue to say that they are more than eager to protect agricultural land and promote agriculture with laws that will bring protections for agriculture, on the other hand, there are a different set of laws that are designed to bypass the first set of protections to provide a loophole or workaround to bypass the first set of protections.
A case in point is the move to amend the TCP code to allow for farmhouses, golf courses, racing circuits and other allied activities within agricultural and orchard lands in the state -- a draft that was withdrawn after an uproar in the State. Similarly, section 16B was inserted in the TCP Act to bypass the very protections for agricultural and orchard land that until now had protected Goa’s fields and hills.
It is imperative that the current bill doesn’t end up with the same fate as similar laws in the past, but once it becomes a law, is enforced in both letter and spirit.
