Goa’s state government, in order to reshape land governance is preparing to introduce two separate bills in the upcoming monsoon session of the legislative assembly aimed at regularising illegal homes and encroachments on comunidade and government-owned land. The monsoon session is set to begin on July 22, and the proposed legislation seeks to bypass traditional comunidade authority.
According to senior officials, the bills will allow the administrator of the comunidade to independently process applications for regularisation of illegal structures built on comunidade land, limiting approvals to structures not exceeding 300 square metres. On government land, district collectors will be granted powers to assess applications, collect market rates for the land, and issue sanads (legal ownership documents) accordingly.
The collected funds will be routed to the respective comunidade accounts, though the comunidade bodies will no longer play an active decision-making role. The government had initially considered promulgating an ordinance, but with the assembly in session next month, it has opted for full legislative debate instead. This legislative attempt follows two previous, unsuccessful efforts by BJP governments in 2001 and 2012 to regularise illegal homes on comunidade lands.
The government plans to eliminate the need for comunidade consent entirely—centralising authority with state-appointed administrators and deputy collectors. As part of the proposal, the government has also recommended a cut-off date of 2025, meaning all structures built illegally on or before that year may be eligible for regularisation. The move has already drawn internal opposition from within the cabinet.
While some ministers are in favour of the plan to offer legal security to thousands of families, others have raised red flags, warning that it may institutionalise illegal construction practices and erode the centuries-old comunidade land system—a unique form of collective landholding rooted in Goa’s Portuguese heritage.
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant had announced in his 2025 budget speech that the state would amend the Goa Regularisation of Unauthorised Construction Act, 2016, to permit regularisation of structures up to 1,000sqm in urban zones and 600sqm in rural areas. The proposed bills appear to extend this policy to include comunidade lands, representing a bold and controversial policy shift.
