Rohit Sinha
Homelessness is not a word often associated with Goa. The image of this state is painted in bright er colours - beaches, music, susegad, a place where people come to escape, not to be left adrift. Yet beneath that post card lies a quieter truth. There are people here without a roof, without the certainty of a place to sleep tomorrow, and without the social support needed to find their way back to stability. Their numbers may not com pare to India’s metros, but their presence tells us something ur gent: homelessness is not just about housing. It is a symptom of many failures stitched to gether - gaps in mental health care, fragmented governance, economic displacement and the erosion of public commons that once made villages and towns supportive ecosystems. The recent protest by Street Providence, Goa’s most visible NGO working with the home less, is a wake-up call. This is not a marginal issue of a few people on the streets. It is the symptom of deeper structural issues - of mental health care, housing, and governance.
The Goa Human Rights Commis sion’s intervention into the dis mal state of mental health in frastructure only confirms this. The homeless are not faceless wanderers. They are patients abandoned by a broken care system, migrants displaced by unaffordable housing, work ers priced out of the economic boom, families fractured by ad diction or unemployment.
Goa is at a turning point. Eco nomic growth is bringing jobs, construction, and migration. The inflow of workers from across the country is reshap ing the state’s demography. Alongside gated colonies and high-rises, we are also seeing the emergence of urban slums. This is not unique to Goa - it is what every growing economy faces. Migrants, often blamed, have in fact been central to Goa’s economy for decades, building its roads, staffing its hotels, run ning its markets. The real issue is when migration collides with weak housing policy and absent social welfare. It creates visible homelessness, but also invisible homelessness - people in tem porary, unsafe conditions with out access to health care, education, or community.
Goa must accept this reality and prepare for it, rather than pretending slums and homelessness are aberrations that will fade away. Homelessness is not a singu lar condition but the outcome of overlapping pressures: mental health struggles without care, displacement caused by rising housing costs, the weakening of community bonds that once absorbed people in distress, and governance that treats housing and welfare as separate silos. Left to collide, these forces do not only put people on the street, they normalise exclusion. The first step is to recog nise homelessness not as an imported urban problem but as a local challenge shaped by local conditions. Goa’s villages and towns were once self-reg ulating systems. Today’s home lessness is a reminder of how the commons have shrunk. The lack of affordable housing is not just about price; it is about the loss of shared spaces and collective responsibility. De velopment has rushed ahead without asking how much a vil lage can absorb; weakening its capacity to care. Copying city models will not work here. Conventional programs assume concentrat ed urban homelessness and build city-centric shelters. Goa’s geography and demogra phy make that approach unfit. Homelessness here is scattered, less visible, and often tied to migration flows, sea sonal employment, or the dis placement of those who cannot afford housing. It is the migrant worker who cannot pay rent in the off-season, the older man estranged from family, the pa tient discharged from a psychiatric hospital with no reinte gration plan. These forms may not add up to a massive urban crisis, but they are urgent for those living through them. Goa needs its own plan, rooted in its geography, village fabric, and socio-economic flows. At the heart of this is the link between mental health and housing. Too often, rehabili tation is treated as a medical exercise while housing is left to market forces. But stability begins with both care and shel ter together. Without one, the other collapses. In Goa, where mental health services are thin and social housing options nearly non-existent, the link is stark.
People discharged from care facilities often return to precarious situations. Families with members facing mental health challenges are left un supported, leading to cycles of neglect, abandonment, and homelessness. This is why Goa needs more than patchwork relief. Afforda ble housing programs must be designed with rehabilitative care in mind. Housing should not be about square footage alone but about support systems - linking shelters with counselling, day-care, skill training, and community ser vices. It also means rejecting the idea that housing is an indi vidual problem for the market to solve, and recognising it as a collective responsibility tied to social wellbeing. Here the idea of carrying ca pacity becomes vital. It is not only an environmental term but a social one—a contract be tween past, present, and future users of a place.
How much can our housing stock, public spac es, and welfare systems sus tain without breaking down? Goa’s housing market, driven by speculation, benefits a few while pushing many to the margins. The result is not just unaffordable homes but a fray ing of the social contract itself. To restore balance, we need ca pacity management in housing just as much as in tourism. If we reframe homelessness as a capacity management fail ure rather than a conflict be tween communities, we move past divisive debates of locals versus migrants. The question is not who belongs and who does not, but whether our sys tems are designed to support all who live and work here. Capacity management means en suring resources are planned equitably, housing supply is not distorted by speculation, and care services expand in proportion to need. It is gov ernance anticipating growth rather than chasing it. The challenge of homeless ness in Goa therefore cannot be solved by charity alone, or by crisis shelters, or by leaving it to the goodwill of individuals. It requires a blueprint that inte grates mental health care, hous ing, and governance into a uni fied state plan.
This blueprint must be rooted in Goa’s region al realities, not in borrowed city models. It must honour the tra ditions of community respon sibility that once defined our villages while adapting them to modern needs. Though not yet a crisis in numbers, it is already a crisis in planning, and every night someone sleeps without shel ter is a reminder that the social contract with our most vulner able has been broken. If we persist in treating homeless ness as an isolated misfortune or an imported problem, we will fail to see its true face.