Amid unbridled demand for land by out-of-state buyers, the cabinet initiated crucial steps to protect Goa’s agricultural land by approving a bill that will effectively ban the sale of such land to non-farmers from outside the state. The bill is also expected to restrict the conversion of paddy fields to settlement land.
Goa has a little over 40,000 hectares of agricultural land, of which 28,000 hectares are cultivable and around 15,000 hectares are fallow.