Goa Land Grab case: ‘How did the dead sign sale deeds?’ | Long Reads News
On a Sunday morning in April 2022, a hurried meeting was called at Our Lady of Miracles, a church on a small hillock in Badem village, a close-knit community of 45 houses in Assagao, in North Goa’s Bardez taluka. After Mass, the priest asked the parishioners to settle down. Christina Dias, 53, a lawyer and local resident, then laid bare an elaborate plot that had been quietly unfolding around them. Badem was the target of a criminal conspiracy, she said, one of the many villages across North Goa where vast tracts of land had allegedly been grabbed by real-estate agents in connivance with government officials. But it was what Dias told them next that shook the gathering: the dead had been signing sale deeds in the village for years, and over half of its properties had already changed hands. As complaints poured in from Calangute, Parra, Anjuna, Pilerne, Nerul and other villages in Bardez taluka, on June 15, 2022, the Goa government formed a seven-member Special Investigation Team (SIT), headed by the Superintendent of Police …
