How a tourist frenzy affects Goa’s local population and ecosystems

In the post-colonial decades, Goa has done well to make its political system inclusive. This is indeed an achievement that we are proud of. The competent have benefitted from the privileges, such as reservations in education and jobs, and moved ahead. They have become a part of the middle class, and often live in urban settings. They “think global”. The past is history for them, something to study, but not a part of their life today. (Yet ours is a society as caste-ridden as any across our border, irrespective of religion, and the late Alito Siqueira battled ceaselessly to see that reservations in admissions and jobs were observed.)

It also needs to be said that despite the problematic years of the transition after Liberation, Goa today is a vibrant civil society where issues of identity, language, and culture are contested in the press, in academic circles, on blogs, sites, as well as on the balcão – the porches of traditional Goan homes. Will these help Goa recover the agency it has shown in the past to generate, imagine, and renew itself again? Can the model of peaceful coexistence in Goa serve as an example to the rest of the country even in...

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