It is only April but Goa is already sweltering in extreme heat, with the air quality index (AQI) spiking over 100, ranging from officially “poor” to “unhealthy.” To make matters much worse, although inherently water rich, India’s smallest state is nonetheless suffering drought conditions, with widespread scarcity exacerbated by supply restrictions and groundwater contamination. Meanwhile, utterly mindlessly, the massacre of trees continues to accelerate, as the landscape is torn apart by unscrupulous profiteering and criminal misgovernance. In the Assembly earlier this month, the administration admitted it’s no longer safe (as per Central Pollution Control Board criteria) to swim or bathe in any of our rivers or beaches, and there was yet another alarming red flag moment a few days ago, when all the fish in Mala Lake suffocated en masse.
There’s no secret about why any of this is happening, as you can see from this newspaper’s reporting about the latest calamity: “A casual walk around Mala Lake is enough to understand why hundreds of fish recently turned up dead. Open drains carrying black, stagnant water, choked with plastic and garbage, can be seen flowing unchecked straight into the lake. In some stretches, sewage pipes appear to empty directly into the water body — an unmissable, unaddressed reality that lays bare the source of contamination. Despite inspections and official activity following the fish deaths, the most obvious cause of the crisis continues in full public view. Residents say there is little mystery here — only prolonged neglect.”
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To be sure, terminal neglect is only one byproduct of the systematic malfeasance and corruption that is beggaring Goa at high speed. In the case of Mala, it manifests in “a blind eye” but in Miramar past Caranzalem to Dona Paula the result is rampant concretisation with high-rises on the waterline and hundreds of new hotel rooms to duplicate the mess at Calangute. What about the roads, the residents, any concerns about carrying capacity? Where are the public consultations, the environmental assessment reports?
Wenceslaus Mendes wrote an insightful survey of Goa’s water crisis in Down to Earth earlier this year, which applies equally to other aspects of the environment being wrecked all around us: “Goa’s water crisis is often described as a problem of mismanaged scarcity, but the evidence tells a different story. The State receives abundant rainfall and is threaded by rivers, wetlands and a long coastline. This is a failure of governance, marked by planning that fragments ecosystems, marginalises community knowledge, and favours short-term growth and profit over long-term resilience. From eroding beaches and polluted rivers to collapsing khazan lands, the patterns are connected. When dunes are flattened, rivers silt up. When wetlands are filled and plateaus destroyed, floods intensify and groundwater disappears. These are not isolated failures, but the cumulative cost of treating water as infrastructure rather than ecology.”
We all know the scale of the problems, so it becomes very hard to not feel helpless, but it is precisely such pain and anger that can develop into powerful art and it has happened that way in Goa, where Amchem Mollem harnesses fantastic imagery alongside stellar activism, senior artists like Loretti Pinto often return to themes of exploitation and there has also been a series of standalone landmark moments like the one depicted in the photograph on this page, when Miriam Koshy-Sukhijia’s Earthivist Collective responded in spontaneous anguish to the vandalisation of acres of mangroves at Merces.
“We created a spiral installation of prayer flags made of gauze,” recalls Koshy-Sukhijia, because “all that remains of that once-thriving vast tract of mangroves is a massive stretch of skeletal trees. What had been destroyed was not just the forest but an entire habitat, and beautiful ecosystem. When trees are to be felled, they are marked in red. Leading the eye to the central spiral of prayer flags are trees draped in red, to alert people to question this destruction as they whizz past along the highway. The installation was an invitation to pause, enter, witness, experience and engage with the site, to gather, meet, talk, perform, and add to the much-needed collective healing in the face of the constant onslaught of ecological grief. In retrospect, I feel gratitude for how this work birthed a community [that was] willing to come together to witness, respond and create a space for engagement at the very site of destruction.”
Koshy-Sukhijia says “I have spent half my life in Goa, raising my children, now both young adults, and watched it being bled dry. In the last two decades, we have traded our canopies for concrete. Our mangroves – those silent, sacred buffers that held our coastline together—have been choked by plastic and cleared for sprawl. Our laterite plateaus, once wild with endemic flowers, have been flattened for housing complexes and industrial estates. Our khazan lands, fed by ancestral wisdom, are salting into emptiness. And our trees have been felled one by one to make room for roads and resorts. The sea is rising at nearly one and a half millimetres every year, and the cyclones that never came to Goa now arrive like clockwork. This is not change. This is dismantling. I feel it in my body – this grief that has nowhere to go. Our children are growing up in the shadow of absence. They are learning to love a landscape that is disappearing before they can fully know it. And that breaks something in me that I cannot name. But here is what I also know. I am not only a mother. I am also a future ancestor. I am not only mourning what was lost. I am claiming what remains. I am telling my children – and their children, and the children I will never meet – that there were some who refused to look away and fought for them like the ground beneath our feet depends on it – because it does.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival)
