GOA'S HEATED REAL ESTATE DRAWS BOTH BUYERS AND IRE By Pamela D'Mello asianage at sancharnet.in
Panaji (GOA): As real estate in this popular tourist paradise gets increasingly snapped up by foreign and domestic buyers -- steadily skewing traditional ownership patterns -- the rumblings of discontent are becoming audible, moving from private conversations into the public realm. Over the past week, the Nationalist Youth Congress wing has petitioned several administrative offices to clamp down and doubly verify whether foreign nationals purchasing land in the state comply with FEMA law-based foreign exchange conditions that permit purchase of immoveable property in India. NYC president and practising lawyer, Rajan Ghate, has criticised state registrars for registering sale deeds to foreign nationals without adequate checks to ensure they met FEMA (Foreign Exchange Management Act) conditions. Amended FEMA rules effective from June, 2000 -- reversed an earlier bar -- allowing even foreign nationals not of Indian origin to purchase immoveable property in India if they proved employment or business connections and had lived 182 days in the country over the previous year. Registrars in Goa, were however reducing the proviso to a farce by merely asking foreigners to produce an affidavit to this effect, without any actual verifications either by the police, collectorates or the RBI foreign exchange office, charged the Nationalist Youth Congress. In meetings with several decks of officials, Mr Ghate said he found departments passing the onus of an actual check onto one another -- resulting in no actual verification at any point. He has now sought records of purchases since 2000, and a verification by the RBI, pointing out that non-compliance of FEMA conditions attracts confiscation and auctioning of the property concerned. Complaints have been forwarded to the state governor and finance minister. Now that the initial trickle of buyers from outside the state and country has swelled to a rush, the NYC says its campaign was launched because "Goans would ultimately become refugees in their own land", unable to compete with market prices. Over the past nine months, real estate prices have spurted sharply, mainly along the coast and major towns. Recent advice given out in investor guides in the UK, Europe and Russia, pegging property purchase in Goa as sound investments -- has fuelled a corresponding market demand. But while those in the real estate and realtor trade, from village panchas to MLAs, benefit from the boom --- anti-outsider sentiments are steadily festering among those left out in the cold. Last week, tenants of a property purchased by a Russian businessman in coastal north Goa, protested their names were surreptiously deleted from government records. Meanwhile the rush to purchase property in Goa -- from functional apartments to swank seaview villas and even tracts of land -- escalates, some consular authorities are beginning to take note. They worry they would have to deal with an inordinately large number of persons, if the law should change. Current laws do not permit full capital convertibility of the Indian rupee, and the Nationalist Youth Congress is already raising demands for a closer verification of documents and conditions.