Goa has become a party hub. But at what cost?

Sometime in the late 1960s and 1970s, as Goa became the last station on the global hippie trail, it attracted travellers from Europe, who arrived in camper vans to North Goa’s coastal towns of Anjuna, Baga, Vagator and Calangute. The local fisherfolk and villagers welcomed the tourists, who, in turn, were charmed by the quiet, sandy beaches and the ‘susegad’ lifestyle.

In the decades since, with Goa transforming into a party hub, the quiet charm of its beaches, especially those in the North, are fast fading. Unbridled growth of tourism, rapid commercialisation, large-scale conversion of eco-sensitive land by real-estate lobbies and a changing demography have led to the mushrooming of party joints and nightclubs in the coastal beach belt, inviting comparisons to Thailand’s Pattaya.

The December 6 fire at Birch by Romeo Lane, a nightclub in North Goa’s Arpora that killed 25 people, including five tourists, served as a reminder that the coastal state’s seemingly unending party may have come at a cost. The inquiry that followed the fire revealed that the club was illegally built on a salt pan (eco-sensitive zone) and had been facing multiple complaints.

Despite the alleged irregularities, as The Indian Express reported earlier, the club received at least seven approvals to operate from the Arpora panchayat and various government departments, including trade, excise and food safety licences, besides a nod from the state pollution control body and three no-objection (NOC) certificates.

With the fire sparking a debate around Goa’s nightclubs, Town and Country Planning Minister Vishwajit Rane had linked rising accidents to alcohol consumption. “Goa does not want a nightclub culture,” he said.

An unending beach party

As the hippies came to North Goa in the 1960s, the villagers offered them food and built rooms for their stay. Slowly, a symbiotic relationship formed. Fisherfolk converted their huts into beach shacks, others set up small restaurants and some offered the tourists boat rides. A flea market came up in Anjuna, where travellers would barter goods. This people-led tourism economy thrived long before the state entered the picture.

“The flower children flocked to Goa in droves” over the next decade, wrote Claude Alvares, Director, Goa Foundation, an environmental NGO, in his book Fish, Curry and Rice. “The publicity that accompanied the discovery of Goa by the hippies ensured that its potential as a tourist destination sank into the consciousness of the tourism sector as well as tourists in India and abroad… Hotels increased rapidly in number, largely… run by locals, soon to be followed by the first few luxury hotels.”

Goa’s first nightclub, Baghaloo, opened on Calangute beach in the early 1960s, soon after the state was liberated from Portuguese rule. However, it was the iconic Tito’s, which started as a beach shack in Baga in the early 1970s and morphed into a club in the 1990s, that came to define Goa’s nightlife, gaining massive popularity among tourists.

The iconic Tito’s Lane in Baga, Goa. Photo by Varun Joshi

At the entrance of Baga beach, a plaque below the statue of the club’s founder Tito Henry de Souza, reads, “In 1971 during the time of the hippies and the flower power generation, and when other young people from Western Europe and the Americas came to Goa seeking enlightenment and peace, Tito Henry de Souza set up a cosy beach-side restaurant and thus opened the floodgates of tourism into Goa. Goan tourism itself was born here on this stretch of beach which is now aptly named Titos Lane…”

Once a narrow, dusty 150-metre stretch that was surrounded by palm trees, Tito’s Lane is now lined with nightclubs and restaurants. The high-pitched, monotonous trance music, which once echoed through this lane, has been replaced by Bollywood numbers. Most clubs now employ bouncers and brawls are common. “Until 15 years ago, Tito’s was the most important lane. Every foreigner would first head to Tito’s,” says Nandan Kudchadkar, who runs LPK Waterfront, a luxury nightclub in Nerul, North Goa.

Statue of Tito Henry de Souza, the founder of Tito’s, at Baga beach. Photo by Varun Joshi

In Vagator and Arpora, the newer clubs offer entertainment in the form of spectacle — flamethrowers and pyro guns, and belly dancers from Russia and Kazakhstan to dazzle the crowd. “This kind of nightclub culture is new to Goa. It started after the pandemic,” says Valles.

The numbers attest to that. Over the last few decades, as Goa’s party scene evolved from shacks to discotheques to open-air clubs, nothing prepared it for what followed after the pandemic — as the beaches reopened, the domestic tourists flooded in while the foreign arrivals lagged. According to figures from the state tourism department, Goa recorded 71.27 lakh domestic and 9.37 lakh international tourists in 2019. In 2024, a record 99.41 lakh domestic tourists and 4.67 lakh international tourists visited the state. Between January and June this year, the state has seen 51.83 lakh domestic tourists and 2.71 lakh foreign tourists.

As tourism boomed and prime land opened up for ‘development’— assisted by the state introducing amendments in land-use laws — new nightclubs, grand in size and scale, came up, often in violation of coastal regulation zone rules and other norms. With many of the panchayats granting indiscriminate licences and NOCs, the nightclubs flourished, often in a haze of regulations.

Tito’s Lane at the entrance of Baga beach. Photo by Varun Joshi

BJP MLA from Calangute, Michael Lobo, who owns hotels and restaurants in the coastal belt, said that nightclubs operate under excise licences and those meant for restaurants. “They don’t get a club licence because it doesn’t exist. The panchayat only gives a licence for a restaurant. Some apply for an excise licence, which allows them to keep the bar or restaurant open till 4 am. So, the safety norms are not being checked by any department,” he explains.

An excise official adds, “We give excise licences to restaurants, but establishments can seek an extension to stay open till 1 am or 4 am by paying additional fees.”

State Tourism Minister Rohan Khaunte says, “When it comes to clubs or nightclubs, we need to look at how we can regulate them. There has to be an umbrella body that overlooks the compliances of all these structures. It (the Arpora fire) was an unfortunate incident, but it has to be a learning experience for the government to put an SOP in place…There has to be some umbrella body to oversee whether such places have all permissions in terms of compliances.”

Lobo says he has been seeking a policy to regulate the licensing of establishments, where a nodal agency is designated for all the safety compliances, before the NOCs are issued by the panchayat.

“In the case of the Arpora incident, the panchayat issued 33 NOCs for a single survey number, without conducting diligence regarding previous documentation. The panchayats are just handing out NOCs en masse…this has to be controlled,” he says.

This oversight, says Dr Oscar Rebello, a social activist who has spearheaded several agitations, has turned Goa’s beaches into “tourist traps” and “concrete slums”, forcing “quality tourists” to move to the quieter beaches of South Goa. “The current pace at which this so-called development of tourism is happening in North Goa is completely unsustainable. It has to collapse,” he says.

He adds, “These nightclubs generate such obscene amounts of revenue in a single night…everyone’s palms are greased to get permissions, so the authorities look the other way. There are more disasters waiting to happen,” Rebello says, adding, “If people come with the intention of Goa being Las Vegas, the state will provide a Las Vegas. But is that what we want?”

He says he has not been to Britto’s restaurant in Baga — a local favourite — in over a decade. “It doesn’t feel like Goa.”

The Goa connection

Others, too, talk of the fraying of Goan’s local character. “It seems the old Goa is outside Baga. The Goan chicken xacuti and fish thali have gone missing from food menus in shacks. Locals complain that shacks and restaurants in Baga sell continental and South Indian cuisine now,” says a beach shack operator in Candolim, among the popular beaches in the North.

A government official says over a third of beach shacks in North Goa are run by non-Goans, a violation of the state’s shack policy.

In June 2024, the Calangute panchayat proposed barring tourists from entering its jurisdiction without a prior hotel reservation. Claiming that over 80% of guest houses in Calangute are run by people from outside the state to whom Goans sub-let the premises, the panchayat alleged that they were often used to run illegal spas or for trafficking.

Joseph Sequeira, sarpanch, village panchayat, Calangute, says the problem arises when Goans sub-let premises to people from other states “who only care about money”.

“A local will apply for permission or license for a guesthouse or a restaurant. It is then rented to someone from Delhi or Mumbai for a profit. The business will go where demand is. There is demand, so everyone wants to make money. If a local approaches us to open a shop, we have to issue an NOC. We are only giving a licence for a restaurant to run till 11 pm. No licence is given to nightclubs. People take a licence for a restaurant and then brand it as a club. It is then the duty of the collector or magistrate or police to see that there is enforcement,” he says.

Following the nightclub fire, the High Court of Bombay at Goa had taken suo motu cognisance of commercial operations in illegal structures in the coastal state and said that the problem lay in the indiscriminate grant of licences. “Though there are certain provisions under the local laws, where the local bodies can take action, in many cases they are not implemented and the provisions remain dead letters in the statute books… All this has led to a very serious issue in the state of Goa,” the court said.

Kudchadkar of LPK Waterfront says everyone — both locals and those who settled down in the state — played a part as they rushed to make the most of Goa.

“Goans knew the art of hospitality. When hippies from Italy arrived, they cut squid and put it in hot oil. That’s how Goans understood it is edible. Now squid is on every menu. As long as these restaurants and clubs had a Goan identity, there was respect. But that changed when others, who did not understand the sanctity of this soil, tried to profiteer. Ultimately, we Goans have also failed,” he says.

He says there is a strong case to be made for retaining Goa’s character. “Goa is a window to your fantasy. It may not be a wild fantasy. You may be living in Karwar (in Karnataka) or Sawantwadi (in Maharashtra)…but what you can’t do there, you can do in Goa. It can be as simple a fantasy as a married woman wearing short pants and riding a scooter, something she may not be able to do in her hometown.”

Most agree that it’s this freedom, the most intangible of what Goa has to offer, that needs to be protected. “Goa evolved as a tourism industry for Indians because they could find freedom here. We need to keep that going,” he says.