The Great Goa Land Grab

The Nordic Asia Podcast

The small Indian state of Goa has witnessed a veritable land rush over many decades, with shifting state governments, leading politicians, and private investors moving in to acquire large tracts of land for a wide range of projects. But what are the drivers of land grabbing in Goa? And what are the consequences for local communities and the environment?

In this episode, we discuss these questions with the authors of the recently published book The Great Goa Land Grab. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out over 15 years, The Great Goa Land Grab unpacks how political and economic interests in the state have aligned to capture predominantly agricultural land in Goa, transforming it to industrial enclaves, real estate, and infrastructure, often with decidedly negative consequences. By bringing the Goan experience into conversation with a larger literature on land politics in contemporary India, the authors show how the specific cases of land dispossession and community marginalization taking place in Goa are not unique, but follow a broader Indian, and even global, land trend.

• Heather Plumridge Bedi is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania.
• Solano da Silva is assistant professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at BITS Pilani Goa.
• Fredrick Noronha Is the founder of the publishing house Goa1556.
• Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.
• Arve Hansen is a human geographer at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. He also leads the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies with Kenneth Bo Nielsen.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.