Gov: Asked Archbishop why Goa’s Christian population going down

“When the clergy came to meet me, I raised the matter with them. One religion is down and the size of another religion has grown to 12%,” Pillai said.

Goa Governor P S Sreedharan Pillai

Goa Governor P S Sreedharan Pillai on Sunday said at a church event in Kochi that he had asked the Archbishop of Goa to look into why the Christian population in the state had gone down while its Muslim population went up.

“I asked him (Filipe Neri Cardinal Ferrão, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Goa and Daman) why the Christian population in Goa, which was 36%, is down to 25% now. At
the same time, Muslim population, which was only 3%, has grown to 12%. I asked him to investigate it positively. They are now conducting a study into that,” he said.

He later told media: “I did not mean any religion. At the time of liberation (of Goa), Christians were the prominent segment. Recently, I read an article that said the Christian population has come down to 25%.”

“When the clergy came to meet me, I raised the matter with them. One religion is down and the size of another religion has grown to 12%,” he said.

He said “brain drain” could be one of the reasons for the decline in Christian population in the state. “It is against this background that I talked about the increase of one religion and decrease of another,” Pillai said.

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