In Goa, growth of luxury hotels, a sparking conflict
“Our village is the size of a coconut shell, how can it take five big resorts?" former sailor Anthony D'Silva let the question hang in the air as a luxury car whizzed past on the narrow village road that leads to Arossim beach in south Goa.
A typical Goan village road, roughly five metres wide, curves several times around tiledroof homes, under a perennial tree cover, before opening up at a dead end amid sand dunes near the Arabian Sea.
Two resorts already operate on a four-kilometre stretch near Arossim beach, and developers have proposed three more — two of them on either side of the scenic deadend.
The number of major hotels and resorts has increased by 170 per cent from 42 in 2008 to 113 in 2018, according to the state department of tourism. In comparison, budget hotels grew 100 per cent from 2,142 in 2008 to 4,286 in 2018.
Arossim symbolises the growing conflict between the rise of luxury tourism in Goa, India's smallest but one of the country's most prosperous and healthiest states. Goa's publichealth expenditure is four times the Indian average, as IndiaSpend reported in February 2017; medical facilities abound, and there is no shortage of health professionals; the sex ratio is among India's best and getting better; and the infant mortality rate is among India’s lowest.
As the Goa government now pushes for greater prosperity, driven in part through tourism — which in 2010 (the latest data available) accounted for 8 per cent of the state's gross domestic product and attracted 7.8 million tourists in 2017, or five times Goa's population — residents of places such as Arossim allege encroachment of common land, takeover of the community's ecological assets and, in some cases, violation of land and environmental laws. By October 2018, nearly 200 hectares of land — or as much as 374 football fields — was involved in seven tourism-related conflicts, affecting about 3,100 people in Goa, according to data collected by Land Conflict Watch, a network of researchers that maps and collects data about ongoing land conflicts in India.
The network has so far collected 16 such tourism-related conflicts in India, spanning over 8,500 hectares, or almost 16,000 football fields, and affecting about 75,000 people in eight states including Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Manipur. In most of these cases, poor and marginalised communities oppose tourism projects because they fear eviction.
In Goa, while direct evictions are rare, tourism conflicts generally involve threats to common land and community resources, which could then lead to evictions. For instance, a golf course is proposing to take over 90 per cent of the land in a village, which includes farmland and forests. To avoid such situations, Goans, like D’Silva, have begun to set aside time from their jobs and families to put up roadblocks, debate in village council meetings on whether these hotels should be allowed to set up, and to fight multiple court cases, challenging the global perception of Goa as a tourism state.
Number of hotels in Goa doubles every 10 years
In 2017, about 7.8 million tourists visited Goa, double the number four years ago, and five times the state's 1.5 million population. The number of hotels has multiplied as well — doubling every 10 years, with luxury hotels being the fastest growing segment, according to state tourism department data from 1998. The growth in the number of Category A hotels, which includes luxury hotels, is the highest among all hotel categories under the Goa, Daman and Diu Registration of Tourist Trade Act of 1982, and have risen from 29 in 1998 to 42 in 2008 to 113 as of March 31, 2018, data show.