Goa: Assagao home to 70% land grab cases being probed by SIT, says SP Nidhin Valsan

PANAJI: Once a quiet village on the outskirts of Mapusa, Assagao - now home to many fine-dining restaurants and a top-of-the-list destination for wealthy tourists - has become a magnet for property swindlers.
"Of the around 100 properties being investigated by the SIT (the special investigation team probing the land grab scam), around 70 are in Assagao," said North Goa and crime branch SP Nidhin Valsan.
There are several factors that placed Assagao under the lens of the land grab brigade. The village - around 1 crore sq m in area - is in close proximity to the world-famous beaches of North Goa.
Also, being part of the old conquest of Bardez, it is home to many old Goan houses marketed as "Portuguese" in the real estate industry. Bardez itself accounts for 90% of the land grab cases being probed by the SIT.
These factors, along with its valley-based landscape, made it a must-invest-in destination, and over the past decade or so, property prices in the village have shot up through the roof. After businessmen, politicians, and land grabbers figured out that the popular coastal belt was facing a land scarcity problem, they immediately shifted their focus to Assagao.
Originally, the residents of Assagao depended on agriculture, along with a thriving horticulture and florist trade, but now, one is more likely to see restaurants in every nook and cranny of the village, serving anything from Japanese to Goan to continental cuisine. Its population is 7,757, with 3,598 men, 3,200 women, and 958 children.
Due to high returns, groups involved in land grabbing targeted Assagao, and most residents of Assagao lived outside the country, thus, it became a soft target for the land grabbers," Valsan said. He added that "as land prices in the village increased, land grabbers stole the record book from the directorate of archives and began forging papers to sell land without the knowledge of the original owners".
He said that there is one group headed by a "mastermind", and three more groups operating in Assagao to grab land. The SIT has so far registered around 45 FIRs in the scam, and more such cases are likely to be registered. Several persons have also been arrested for land grabbing.