Right before the Mapusa river meets the Mandovi river near Panjim, it crosses the wetlands, creeks and low lying paddy fields of Salvador Do Mundo. Surrounding these large stretches of paddy fields are houses and forested hills with steep slopes. Telangana-based real-estate company, KGL Realtors Private Limited bought 20,000 square metres of land on one of these hills.

When the land was bought, the sale deed described it as “barren and waste land”. In Goa, a state-wide regional plan dictates what activities are permitted on a piece of land. The land that KGL bought is zoned as eco-sensitive land where development is regulated. It specifically categorises all of it as Natural Cover and part (4,000 square metres) of it as Natural Cover with “No Development Slopes”.

The Regional Plan 2021, published in 2010, marked nearly 82% of the state as eco-sensitive zones, providing them with protection from rampant construction and development.

Land is a state subject in India and all states have town planning acts which govern spatial planning. But other than seven states, these acts only focus on urban areas. In Goa, the regional plan was created based on the provisions of the Town and Country Planning Act (TCP Act) and covers the entire state. Over the last eight years, the government has introduced three successive amendments to the Act allowing the government to do plot-by-plot change of zones in the regional plan. The latest of these amendments was introduced in 2024 as Section 39A, which allows land owners to apply for zone changes of their plots.

On June 10, 2026, Goa’s TCP board recommended that the zoning for the plot bought by KGL be changed to settlement zone, which once finalised, will allow the company to construct on the land. As per the rules for processing these applications, slopes over 25% gradient are eco-sensitive land and cannot be considered for conversion.

Yet, over a quarter (26%) of the 901 applications that received provisional approvals under section 39A in the last two years have been for plots that had such steep slopes, as per an analysis of data collated from official gazettes by citizens groups. This included KGL’s application to convert over 4,000 square metres of No Development Slope–the special demarcation for areas with a slope greater than 25%– to settlement area. The TCP board, which gave the provisional approval, said that the change of zone was recommended because the area was “within permissible gradient”.

In July 2026, some of the residents of Salvador Do Mundo wrote a letter to the Chief Town Planner objecting to this conversion. A key objection was that the recommendation was based on slope data submitted by a private engineer hired by the applicant, without independent verification. The contour plan submitted by the applicant showed the slope gradient of the plot to be 18.49% but data from ISRO’s satellite model shows that parts of the land have over 25% gradient.

The area within the yellow box is the plot owned by KGL, that they want to convert to a settlement zone. The areas coloured in red and yellow show slope data from ISRO’s CartoDEM elevation model. Red shows slopes between 25-35%, orange denotes slopes between 20-25% and yellow depicts slopes between 10-20%. (Source: https://amche.in/)

While Goa’s laws are clear that no construction is permitted on slopes over 25%, the government is relying on data from private surveyors and engineers to determine which slope fits this criteria. Activists said that these surveyors can have a conflict of interest as they are hired by applicants seeking permission for hill cutting and that the lack of independent verification of this data is diluting protection given to steep slopes.

We have asked the Chief Town Planner Vertika Dagur if these plans are independently verified and how they assess these discrepancies. We will update this story when we receive a response.

In 1997, Goa amended the TCP Act and introduced Section 17A that prohibits cutting of hills, with an aim to reduce the state’s vulnerability to landslides.

India is among the top four countries with highest landslide risk, with nearly 12.6% of the land prone to landslides. Most vulnerable areas are the mountainous region of the North-Western Himalayas, the Sub-Himalayan terrain of the North-East, the Western and Eastern Ghats. A landslide is essentially the failure of a slope triggered either by natural causes like excess rainfall, flooding, earthquakes or anthropogenic activities like deforestation, hill cutting and excessive development.

Many states, such as Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, have introduced provisions restricting development on slopes and hills with an aim to keep the slopes stable and reduce landslide risks. But Goa explicitly demarcates areas with slopes where development is prohibited, a feature that activists said helps in pushing back against illegal hill cutting.

Between March and August 2026, ISignal analysed publicly available data on these conversions, examined physical files of some of the applications and interviewed environmentalists,........

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