Legislation with a loaded purpose
The Suits Valuation Amendment Bill, 2025 was tabled in the Goa Legislative Assembly under the pretext of bringing uniformity in the valuation of suits for the purposes of determining jurisdiction and court fees. On paper, it is portrayed as a procedural fine-tuning aligned with the Goa Court-Fees Act, 2024. In reality, its timing and scope raise a deeper question: is the government quietly burdening local litigants while simultaneously ensuring that the transactional cost of registering property deeds, especially for non-Goan buyers, remains comfortably static? The synchronised pairing of the new suit valuation regime with last year’s Court-Fees overhaul cannot be divorced from the wider policy signals emanating from the State’s property and registration sector.
Burden shift to litigants
The Goa Court-Fees Act, 2024 was already a significant shift in the cost framework for initiating and defending civil litigation. By linking court fees directly to notified land valuations, the Suits Valuation Amendment ensures that any upward revision in government valuation tables will translate directly into heavier fees for those seeking to protect their rights in court. In most cases, these litigants are Goans defending inheritance claims, land partitions, or ownership disputes, matters that rarely concern wealthy outsiders. Instead of easing their financial burden, the government has opted to legislate in a way that could make access to justice more costly at the very moment when legal defence is unavoidable.
Registration fees: The sacred cow
Contrast this with the domain of registration fees. Goa continues to charge between 3% and 3.5% for registering sale deeds, while stamp duty ranges from 3.5% to 6%, depending on the value of the transaction. These figures are already high compared to many other Indian states where registration fees hover around 1%. And yet, the State has conspicuously refrained from making any upward revision in this sector. The silence is telling. While court-related costs for locals are being recalibrated upward through indirect mechanisms, the transactional costs for property sales, a domain in which wealthy non-Goan buyers are heavily represented, are left untouched. The government’s reluctance to alter registration fees functions as a tacit facilitation of out-of-state acquisitions.
The nationalisation shadow
This dual policy track feeds into a broader suspicion that Goa’s property market is being quietly aligned with the Union government’s vision of nationalising access to land and housing across states, with Goa positioned as a high-value acquisition zone for metropolitan investors. Maintaining steady registration fees while easing procedural hurdles for deed registration ensures a frictionless entry for buyers from regions like Delhi, where real estate prices have reached unsustainable heights. In this light, the Suits Valuation Amendment appears less like a neutral procedural reform and more like an administrative counterpart to a demographic reconfiguration policy.
Goans in the courtroom and outsiders at the sub-registrar
The resulting imbalance is stark. Goans who wish to defend ancestral property rights or challenge encroachments now face the risk of inflated court fees due to revised valuation schedules. Outsiders, by contrast, can purchase property at predictable transactional costs, insulated from the inflationary pressures that the government is now prepared to impose on litigation. The contrast is not accidental, it is structural. It is a policy choice that prioritises market liquidity over legal protection for the State’s residents.
Avoidance of transparency
If this legislative move were purely about rationalising valuation, the government would have issued draft valuation tables for public comment before introducing the Bill. Instead, the details remain obscure, with no ward-level or taluka-level valuation metrics released. This opacity ensures that by the time litigants feel the pinch in the form of higher court fees, the legislative process will have been concluded and irreversible. Meanwhile, the stamp duty and registration fee schedules are a matter of public record, but the political will to touch them is conspicuously absent.
A disguised revenue strategy
One must also consider the fiscal angle. Court fees are a direct revenue stream for the State exchequer. Raising them through valuation adjustments is politically safer than hiking registration fees, which would immediately antagonise the real estate lobby and high-value buyers. In other words, the government appears to have chosen the path of least political resistance but greatest social harm: squeeze court users, leave property buyers untouched.
Impact on access to justice
The net result is a regression in access to justice. Civil litigation in Goa is already protracted, often spanning years due to procedural delays and overloaded dockets. Adding a heavier financial barrier at the entry point will discourage rightful claims, particularly from middle-income and rural Goans. The legal system thus risks becoming more exclusive, available primarily to those who can afford to absorb these front-loaded costs.
The constitutional dimension
Article 39A of the Constitution obliges the State to ensure equal access to justice, while Article 14 guarantees equality before the law. A fiscal framework that effectively makes it cheaper to buy property than to defend it in court is antithetical to both principles. This is not merely a question of legislative policy, it is a matter of constitutional propriety.
Policy recommendations
If the government’s aim were genuinely to balance litigation efficiency with transactional accessibility, it could have pursued a different path:
1. Introduce valuation-linked court fees but cap them for low-income litigants.
2. Implement periodic downward revisions of registration fees in tandem with upward court-fee revisions to maintain fiscal neutrality.
3. Mandate public consultation on valuation schedules before notification.
4. Link property tax rates and registration fees to residency status, ensuring that Goans and long-term residents do not compete on equal footing with speculative buyers from outside the State.
What the Assembly must address
The Legislative Assembly still has the opportunity to amend the Suits Valuation framework before final notification. Opposition members should demand disclosure of proposed valuation tables and a comparative study of registration fee structures across states. The central question, why the State is prepared to burden its litigants but not its deed registrants, must be answered on the floor of the House.
Conclusion: A question of allegiance
Ultimately, legislation reveals where a government’s allegiance lies. In this case, the State government’s legislative and fiscal posture suggests a closer alignment with the real estate market’s liquidity needs than with the legal protection needs of its residents. If left unchallenged, the Suits Valuation Amendment Bill, 2025 will not merely standardise valuations, it will standardise disadvantage for Goans in the courtroom while safeguarding advantage for outsiders at the registration desk. In the constitutional balance between market facilitation and access to justice, the scale is tipping in the wrong direction.
