The writer is professor at Columbia University in the USA who hails from Cortalim
GLOBAL GOENKARS SPEAK
There is an old saying that the devil is in the details. Sometimes, the future is too. When Section 39A of the Goa Town and Country Planning Act was introduced in 2024, it sounded like a modest amendment to solve a modest problem.
We were told it would correct planning anomalies and help small landowners, particularly those in rural Goa, whose properties had been unfairly zoned. It would allow families to improve or extend their homes. It sounded practical. On paper, it sounded fair as well as compassionate. Who could object to helping a small landowner?
Yet even then, some legislators warned that the amendment could become something far larger than its stated purpose. Their objections ended in extraordinary scenes inside the Assembly, with opposition members physically lifted and dragged out as the Bill was passed.
Those images faded from the headlines. The questions did not.
Today, those same questions are echoing across Goa. From Chimbel to Karapur, from Navelim to Sancoale and Cortalim, village after village has found its voice. The Karapur protests have travelled from Azad Maidan to Jantar Mantar in New Delhi.
People, especially elderly women from rural villages, do not leave their homes and travel nearly two thousand kilometres because they dislike development. They do so because they believe something precious is slipping away.
Perhaps that is why this debate no longer feels as though it is about one amendment. It feels as though it is about the future of Goa.
If Section 39A was introduced to help small landowners, why has it become associated in the minds of so many people with proposals involving extensive tracts of orchard land, forested hillsides and rural landscapes? Why are communities, farmers and village residents among those leading the protests?
Development itself is not the issue. Goa needs homes, affordable ones, investment and employment. But development also depends on things we rarely notice until they begin to fail: water, electricity, roads, sewage systems and garbage collection.
Many villages are already struggling with these essentials. If they are under pressure today, how will they cope with much larger developments tomorrow?
We are also told these projects will create jobs. They probably will. The question is what kind of jobs. Will they encourage young Goans to build businesses, innovate and remain in the State? Or will many find themselves maintaining luxury villas, cleaning swimming pools, tending landscaped estates and servicing gated communities built on land that once grew food, recharged wells and sustained entire villages?
There is dignity in every honest profession. But it is worth asking whether that is the future we imagined for our children. I also wonder what the younger members of the party in power think when they defend these policies, not as politicians, but as young Goans. What kind of Goa do they hope to inherit? What stories do they hope their grandchildren will hear one day? Stories about forests, orchards and village paths they explored as children? Or stories about where those places once stood?
At a protest by communities from Karapur, I found myself watching the faces more than listening to the speeches. There were elderly women who had probably never imagined they would stand before microphones. Young mothers held their children close. One young woman struggled to hold back her tears as she spoke about what she feared these developments might mean for her village and for the future of her community.
Her emotion stayed with me long after the gathering had ended. It reminded me that these protests are not really about files, planning maps or legal amendments.
They are about belonging. As I headed home on my institute’s shuttle, my thoughts drifted back to my childhood.
When my family returned from Kenya to our ancestral home in Cortalim, a young village woman named Rohini would take us into the hills during the summer to gather cashew fruit, kandas and chunnas. We children would rush excitedly towards the ripest fruit until she gently stopped us.
“Look first,” she would say. Hidden among the branches were cone-shaped nests woven from fresh leaves, home to fierce red ants. Somehow, the sweetest fruit always seemed to be guarded by the largest colonies. At the time, I thought Rohini was simply protecting us from a painful bite.
Only much later did I realise she was teaching us something far more enduring. The land has its own special way of warning us when we begin asking too much of it.
I lost touch with Rohini many years ago. But watching those women in Karapur, I realised that perhaps she had never really disappeared. From Chimbel to Karapur, from Navelim to Sancoale and Cortalim, I see many more Rohinis emerging.
Women who may never have spoken at a public meeting before, yet who have found the courage to speak because they fear losing the villages that shaped them. They are not asking for special treatment. They are asking that the land which has sustained generations should not be treated as just another commodity.
Perhaps that is Goa’s warning. Not a warning against progress, but against mistaking construction for development and short-term gain for lasting prosperity.
Years from now, few people will remember the wording of Section 39A. They will remember the Goa it left behind.
