As there will be no Assembly sitting before the elections and it will not be possible to bring the amendment to the floor of the House for voting, the government plans to issue an ordinance providing the new procedure for change of name and surname. This amendment essentially will allow only those persons whose parents or grandparents have been born in Goa (so Goan origin) to change their name and surname. In addition to this, the powers to approve any change in name and surname will be accorded to Judges of Civil Court Senior Division and the District Courts.
While this may appear stringent, there are reasons for it. The main one being that there have been several complaints received by the government of persons who are not of Goan origin, but who are from other States and are living in Goa, and have been changing their surnames to common local Goan surnames. The number of such changes has been escalating in recent months and this has been brought up regularly and this is not the first time that the government has addressed the issue and made an attempt to stop it. In the past the issue was debated in the State Assembly, with, in 2019, a Bill passed to amend the Act to make such changes a criminal offence.
Surname change, at first glance may appear to be an inoffensive matter, with the sole intention being to fit in with the rest of the State. Yet, Goa’s demographics have altered such that such a change in surname is not required, and hence the possibility of gaining other benefits by the name change has arisen. MLAs, when debating in the Assembly in 2019, had pointed out that this was being done to avail the facility of Portuguese passports and also to benefit from land deals in the State. The then Curtorim MLA Aleixo Reginaldo Lourenco, with RTI data, had claimed that in three years over 4000 cases of name change had come up.
In addition, the Gomantak Bhandari Samaj has consistently raised the issue of migrants in Goa changing their names and seeking to take the Naik surname, stating that this is done with the intention of obtaining benefits under the Other Backward Classes category. The samaj also proferred examples with their charges. The samaj had further pointed out that the Goa Change of Name and Surname Act 1990 does not permit this but that there exists a provision for correction of spelling so as to get the right spelling in English when the surname is translated from Portuguese. It is this provision that the migrants are taking advantage of and getting their names, or rather their surnames, changed, they had charged and had demanded action by the government. The government has finally acted and though the timing has shades of an electoral appeasement of the Bhandari samaj, it was definitely required to be brought about.
Whether the new amendment will succeed in ending this change in surname nuisance is still early to tell, but some action from the government was required. There would, however, be genuine cases, where there are corrections of spellings or minor variations in the spellings that may have differed from the birth certificate to other certificates issued later and need to be corrected. The authorities must ensure that these should not suffer due to the amendment.