Team Goemkarponn
Panaji: Taking a major step towards resolving the issue of unauthorized homes built on private land, the Goa government has constituted a ten-member committee to explore legal avenues for regularizing such constructions and granting ownership rights to the occupants.
The panel, headed by senior advocate Ramchandran Ramani, will study unauthorized residential structures built over the years on non-government land and suggest suitable legislative or policy measures to regularize them. The committee has been formed with a mandate to recommend either new laws or amendments to existing legislation that would enable conferring ownership rights, wherever legally and publicly feasible.
The committee will also evaluate broader land-use challenges, including the impact of development on private land, and recommend strategies for sustainable management and conservation of land resources. It will consider public interest, legal permissibility, and long-standing occupation while proposing solutions.
Other members of the panel include legal experts Adv. Aires Pinto Furtado, Adv. Amrut Ghatwal, Adv. Pritam Moraes, and Adv. Prasad Naik. Government officials on the panel include Director of Panchayats Siddhi Halarnkar, Joint Secretary (Revenue) Surendra Naik, Director of Settlement and Land Records Chandrakant Shetkar, and Dr. Balaji Shenvy from the Directorate of Archives. Additional Collector (North) Gurudas Desai will serve as the committee’s member secretary.
As per the order issued by Under Secretary for Revenue Vrushika Kauthankar, the committee is expected to submit its recommendations within three months.
This initiative comes as the State government has already decided to bring in legislation to regularize unauthorized homes on government and comunidade lands during the upcoming monsoon session of the Goa Legislative Assembly.
