In the aftermath of the pandemic, when India was cautiously emerging from successive lockdowns, a routine administrative errand in Mumbai offered an unexpected lesson in political economy.
Outside a visa processing centre operated by BLS International, nestled among glass towers and financial institutions, stood an ageing five-storey building: its façade worn by time, yet evidently valuable by location alone.
Parked beside it was a top-end luxury vehicle, its owner quietly supervising routine maintenance work, flanked by security personnel whose task was less about intimidation and more about preserving order in a crowded commercial district.
What was striking was not the display of wealth, but the absence of ostentation. The owner appeared weighed down by responsibility rather than intoxicated by privilege.
The building was not treated as a speculative asset to be liquidated at the first opportunity, but as an inheritance to be managed, preserved, and incrementally improved.
That moment lingered because it presented a sharp contrast to the Goan condition. In Goa, landholding is not an anomaly. It is historically the norm. For generations, sons and daughters have inherited houses, plots, and agricultural lands not as windfalls, but as continuities of family life.
Yet, paradoxically, this abundance has not translated into security or dignity. Instead, it has coincided with a steady exodus: of youth to foreign shores, of families to migrant livelihoods, of ancestral properties into speculative markets.
Land, rather than anchoring Goans, has become the currency that finances departure. The tragedy is not that Goans sell land. It is that they sell it to leave.
At the same time, public discourse has become saturated with calls for absolute environmental conservation, often framed as a moral imperative divorced from social realities.
Forests must remain untouched, fields must not be re-purposed, infrastructure must be frozen, and all the while an entire generation quietly migrates in search of dignity, employment, and stability.
Conservation, in this circumstance shall hinder human return. Development is postponed indefinitely, pending an ideal equilibrium that never arrives.
Lessons from elsewhere
Comparative models offer a sobering counterpoint. In jurisdictions such as the United Arab Emirates, land ownership and economic control are deliberately retained by nationals. Foreign participation is permitted, even encouraged, but never at the cost of dispossessing citizens.
Long-term leases, local sponsorship requirements, and structured partnerships ensure that development occurs through nationals, not instead of them.
Environmental regulation exists, but it does not override the foundational goal of keeping citizens rooted, prosperous, and invested in their homeland.
Goa, by contrast, has embraced open competition for land while offering little structural protection to hereditary Goans. The result is a curious inversion. Conservation is urged at a moment when the custodians of the land are leaving. Ideals are preserved while communities fragment. A land without its people is not a sanctuary; it is a museum.
When abundance
produces anxiety
Conversations around conservation often proceed as though Goa were a static landscape rather than a living society. Forests are spoken of in abstraction, fields in sentiment, and villages in nostalgia, while the people most intimately connected to them quietly depart in search of dignity, employment, and stability elsewhere.
Conservation, when framed without reference to livelihoods, housing, healthcare, education, and economic mobility, risks becoming a moral luxury afforded only by those who are insulated from its consequences.
Urbanisation is not a cultural failure. It is a civilisational process. Roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, irrigation systems, inland waterways, and industrial zones are not antithetical to dignity. They are instruments through which dignity is realised. When conservation is deployed to freeze development without offering alternative pathways for human flourishing, it ceases to be protective and becomes exclusionary.
Democracy, development
and representation
In a constitutional democracy, the articulation of collective priorities is not entrusted to sentiment alone. It is mediated through elected representatives, legislative debate, and executive decision-making.
Development policies placed before the Goa Legislative Assembly are expressions of the electorate’s will, translated into law through constitutional processes.
These choices may be contested, refined, or judicially reviewed, but they cannot be casually displaced by moral campaigns, however well intentioned.
The increasing prominence of environmental advocacy led by eminent but unelected figures raises a delicate question:
‘When conservation frameworks are proposed without electoral mandate, statutory backing, or institutional accountability, they risk subverting democratic balance?’
Idealism, when detached from governance, can inadvertently erode the very legitimacy required to sustain long-term environmental protection.
This concern becomes acute when conservation rhetoric collides with pressing social needs.
There is little value in preserving landscapes that the next generation cannot afford to inhabit.
There is no justice in freezing land use while Goans are priced out of their own villages.
Environmental protection must operate within the constitutional framework, not above it.
Reframing conservation
Recent conservation initiatives, including proposals advanced by retired constitutional figures such as Retd Justice Ferdino Rebello and reportedly endorsed by the Ex-CJI of India Justice BR Gavai, have rekindled public debate.
While the intent to protect Goa’s fragile ecology is beyond dispute, the method and sequencing demand scrutiny. Conservation presented as an absolute ideal, while being distanced from social and economic context, risks becoming performative rather than transformative.
For Goans, conservation cannot precede belonging. Rights must come before restraint. The return of youth, the retention of families, and the confidence to build lives at home are prerequisites for meaningful environmental stewardship. A land emptied of its people may be preserved in form, but it is hollow in spirit.
Environmental protection in Goa must therefore be reframed. It must be grounded in democratic consent, aligned with development planning, and attentive to human dignity.
Only when Goans are enabled to stay, to build, and to prosper will conservation cease to be a slogan and become a shared responsibility.
A Goa that conserves its forests but loses its people has conserved nothing of lasting value.
