Sometimes, when the sun is setting over a village called Aldona, and the evening bread is delivered on the backs of bicycles, you can convince yourself that Goa is all right. When Reginald or Tulsidas or Lata or Maria stand at the front gate speaking to that passerby at dusk, and the urak season starts slipping into the feni days, so all you smell on the road is the arch fermentation of cashew apples: yes, it’s OK.
But then you think about the beaches, the ones with the plastic bags in the water, which you mistook for jellyfish, and the shards of glass from the beer bottles carried into the waves, which now churn with sewage from the septic tanks. Those beaches; you can forget those beaches.
And the hills and roadsides, covered in garbage, blossoming like wildflower. And the earth inland that mining has stripped bare and turned rust-red, leaving peacocks dead from contaminated groundwater. The Mandovi river, too, full of floating casinos and effluent. You can forget these things. And you can remember Goa’s ghosts.
My husband and I moved to north Goa eight years ago, though I first visited with my family 30 years ago, when I was four; we drove down from Bombay in the car, my brother seeing his first nudist on the beach, his mind blown. This time we came so I could study yoga, and we realised there was no reason to leave. Goa was beautiful, laid-back yet exciting, a meeting place for the world. Sure, there were problems. But the beaches! The restaurants! The music, and the people!
It was about four years ago when the doubts first crept in. We noticed how swimming in the sea would leave us with a sore throat or infect a cut. We could no longer pretend the garbage piles on the Assagao, Siolim and Parra hills weren’t getting worse. We saw the trickle of new construction becoming a torrent. And, looking around, we realised many who had created Goa’s culture were now looking elsewhere: locals sought Portuguese passports; foreigners talked about Cambodia or weighed the merits of staying in Europe, saying the good days were over. On balance, it was still worth it. And our village of Assagao – we said – was special, hidden from the corrupted beach-belt; things would be fine.
But things are not fine. The garbage is out of control, river shellfish have been decimated by coliform bacteria, turtle nesting grounds have been ruined. And the construction … it has exploded. We went away for work for six months, and when we returned six Portuguese villas in our village had been demolished. In their place were construction sites for luxury apartment complexes, the required sand dredged from the rivers, the necessary water drained from wells that ran dry in January. And it’s not just our village: Anjuna and Vagator are changing even faster, with new projects such as Rainforest Boulevard (complete with fake photo of Goa’s beaches in the brochure) and Goa Junction (“for those who choose to be among the privileged few [and] believe in a king-sized lavish & luxurious life”) rising up.
The most recent horror? The “eco-tourism” development of the ecologically sensitive Chapora river area by means of “ferry terminals, a tourist village, museum, marinas, fisherman’s wharf, hotels, an underwater aquarium, sea world, a bird park, an adventure sports island, a tree-top hotel, hotel complex, an exhibition centre …”
With sadness, we have decided to leave, to look toward Europe or Latin America. I have canvassed the opinions of long-term foreign visitors who have also turned away. For Manu from Mexico, the filthy sea was the final straw, though there is also the unscrupulous local business people, “always wanting to take advantage or cheat you in some way”. Phil from England, who has been coming here for 25 years, said: “The joke I made this season was, we all used to say Goa was not the real India, but now REAL India has turned up.” And Marco, who has been driving his VW bus from Switzerland to India for years via Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan wrote: “I think I’m not coming back. Too much pollution, traffic, crazy tourists, new buildings, corruption …”
Foreign tourism has been falling for the last few years. India News Network reported that the total number of foreign tourists has fallen 20% compared over the last two years, while The Times of India said 57,000 foreign tourists arrived between October and December 2015, compared with the 85,000 in the same period the previous year. Over 20,000 Russians, the demographic Goa recently relied on, have cancelled trips. The collapsing rouble and problems in the eurozone are external factors that partly explain the disappearing foreign tourist, but Goa doesn’t help itself. In an IndyaWire.com social media survey, 42% of Russians who had visited in the last four years said they wouldn’t be coming back: Goa was too expensive, too dirty, the taxi mafia too aggressive, women didn’t feel safe, the police were unco-operative.
Anecdotal evidence supports claims of increased harassment of women. A chef friend from Chandigarh, who worked late in a restaurant, had to switch from a scooter to a car because she was being stalked on her way home. An Italian woman here for 10 days stopped travelling alone after a man tried to force her off her bike at night. And a Californian friend who has lived in India for more than 30 years told me about a new bag snatching gang targeting single females travelling alone in the evenings. Little by little, the foreigners who have settled here, the ones who made the parties and the markets come alive, are going elsewhere.
But hey … good riddance? We don’t need you? Domestic tourism will pick up the shortfall – after all, it rose 35% between 2013 and 2014. Here’s the rub, though: aside from dramatically altering a place that, in the words of one friend, “has been geared toward foreigners for 40 years”, the bulk of this incoming demographic doesn’t bring much money to the local economy. They generally arrive by the jeep- or coach-load, stay in budget hotels or in their own vehicles, cook their own food if they can or eat all-inclusive, generate huge amounts of garbage and leave.
Revenues are falling. But the budget hotels and apartments built to cope with this boom are costing Goa big. The coastal belt is becoming a concrete wilderness, the jammed roads are seeing more fatal accidents, the beaches are becoming filthier. Occasionally, they become sinister. In the popular Indian imagination, the liberal, laid-back Goa that accepted the hippies all those years ago is a den of sin, a land of sex, drugs and drink, where anything goes. And so it has become. When my husband went to photograph Calangute beach recently, a pimp approached him within five minutes, “You want to fuck nice girls?” he whispered, while the police sat a few feet away.
It’s a rush toward low-quality, pack-em-in resorts, at great environmental cost. Which is funny, as the Goa government has been talking about high-end tourism for years. It was always its plan: get rid of the hippies and bring in the high-rollers. That’s what the then chief minister Manohar Parrikar told me when I interviewed him in 2004. Well, they got rid of the hippies. And the high-end tourists? Surprise! They’re not coming. But they will, according to the government; they’ll come as soon as the Panaji to Reis Magos Ropeway is built. A cable car, costing £10m, linking the capital city to a fort across the river: that’s the secret weapon to bring in the luxury crowd.
This is the government that green-lit sand mining in the rivers, and the recommencement of iron-ore mining inland. This is the government that thinks the way to fix things is to put Wi-Fi on the beaches, along with CCTV. It is not the first. In 2011, the Congress government proposed a marina and a “Disneyland style adventure park”, which would surely bring in the high-end tourists. Nothing came of those things.
This is what the government cannot understand: Goa has always had everything it needs: pristine beaches, charming villages, immaculate countryside, friendly people, a tolerant culture. It still has it, in places. The early mornings can be glorious, the inland areas around Quepem and Salcete in south Goa hold fast to their sleepy, genteel charm and the rugged coastline of Canacona, between the river Sal and Agonda beach, is still a bio-diverse wonderland.
There is always hope. A new (albeit controversial) waste treatment plant is coming at Saligao, while Olaulim and Parra panchayats (councils) are doing great work in garbage management. Groups and individuals are striving for a better Goa: environmentalists Claude and Norma Alvares, the Goa-based NGO Video Volunteers and social activist Dr Oscar Rebello among them. Another, in Assagao, is Felly Gomes who, along with his wife Beatriz Contreras Milla, runs the Live Happy social activism NGO, raising garbage awareness in schools, temples and churches, recycling and composting villages’ waste, and running yoga and mediation classes with the funds raised. Ultimately, however, the authorities have to step in and help.
For now, a sense of sadness lingers. I talk to the husband and wife who run one of my local fish-curry-rice places. They tell me that “everything is corrupted; everything is gone”, and when considering the construction boom add that “in five years the village will be lost.”
We look to the agricultural land next door to their business and they both wonder if in 10 years even this will be sold. But what can they do? It’s a question you hear often. What can we do? The answer is unclear. What is certain is that the state is in a period of upheaval, and whatever the outcome, the Goa we once knew is gone.