Paradise being lost to property snatchers, slice by green slice in Goa

It took a formidable woman to call a foul on the state’s land usurpers. Goa’s maiden Arjuna awardee and former captain of India’s women hockey team, Dr Otilia Mascarenhas, was the first to highlight the menace of land grabbing in the state, in 2013, after her ancestral property at Porvorim was grabbed.The case made headlines but the authorities’ response, in hindsight, was newsworthy perhaps just for its sluggishness. A special investigation team (SIT) was set up to probe land-grabbing cases in Goa only in June 2022. It has received about 600 petitions over the past 15 months. 105633498As for Mascarenhas, she had inherited the property through a will in 1997 from her uncle. He died in 2002. Her house was locked most of the time except during her visits to Goa. She was in the state from December 2012 to March 2013. In October 2013, she learnt that her house had been sold by a usurper for `70 lakh.The economic offences cell (EOC) of Goa police filed an FIR and arrested the accused, but it took six years for Mascarenhas to get the two fraudulent sale deeds of her property to be declared null and void by court. 105633509NRI Goans targeted oftenYears after Mascarenhas filed her complaint, the Goa government finally constituted the SIT and a one-man commission to probe the land-grab cases in the state.Terming the land scam “very big”, chief minister Pramod Sawant constituted the SIT and the commission after Goans who have settled aboard began to approach various authorities to complain about their ancestral properties being grabbed.A majority of the land-grab cases are reported from the coastal belt — Bardez, Tiswadi, as well as Pernem and Salcete, with many of the complainants being non-resident Indians. 105633534Anatomy of a swindleAlthough land grabbing has been reported over the past two decades, the cases seem to have increased over the past decade and a half.By that stage, land grabbing had become such a sophisticated operation that fraudsters began using documents from the directorate of archives and archaeology to forge papers to annex properties. The department houses crucial records such as birth certificates and deeds.Before the SIT was constituted, Goa police data reveals that 128 land-scam cases were registered in the state over 10 years, and more than half of these — 73 — were from Porvorim/Socorro and Mapusa in Bardez taluka.In most cases, the accused persons identified the land and created fake property ownership papers. The property was then sold to an accomplice before it was finally sold to a third party. This is a common modus operandi even today.The SIT is currently probing more than 100 land-grab cases and several persons have been arrested including politicians. The SIT has so far registered about 45 FIRs, and more cases are likely to be registered.Scam’s ground zeroAssagao, on the outskirts of Mapusa, was once a quiet village. Now it throbs with wealthy footfall drawn by its fine-dining restaurants and upscale hotels. The turnaround has also attracted a swarm of property swindlers. “Of the about 100 properties being investigated by the SIT, 90 are in Assagao,” North Goa and crime branch SP Nidhin Valsan has told TOI.Due to high returns, groups involved in land grabbing homed in on Assagao. It was a soft target because many of its residents lived outside the country.As land prices in the village mounted, land grabbers stole the record book from the directorate of archives and began forging papers to sell land. The original owners had no inkling that they were being cheated.To crack down on property snatchers, the state government constituted the one-man commission in August last year. The commission has been told to fix responsibility in all cases of land grabbing and to expose the involvement of government officials, public functionaries, and private individuals. The commission is expected to find loopholes, deficiencies, lacunae, and negligence in the administrative system and legal framework that led to such large-scale land grabbing.