Dear Reader,

As a Goan raised in Mumbai, I remember most vividly the family trips to Goa as a child. On picnics at Miramar Beach in North Goa, we spread our mats and food on an obscure edge of the beach — a strategic location where sand dunes just about softened the winds, keeping our paper plates intact.

Now in my 20s, I often ride along the same road, looking for that spot that doesn't seem to exist. A line of resorts, villas, and real estate, or a concrete pavement, greets me instead, opening into flat sand and the ocean beyond.

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon news of a luxury resort by the American hotel and resort company Hilton in Varca, South Goa, which sparked the idea for this story. In the clip, Shohail Furtado, an activist from Varca, expressed concerns about how the proposed project would compete with the village's land and water resources while damaging dunes. I pitched a much broader story to The Xylom’s editorial team, who then helped me streamline the story.

I met Shohail on a hot, sunny day towards the end of May, when the sand burned my feet. I remember standing on the dunes, staring in awe as they overlooked the beach that opened into Varca’s waters. Shohail climbed the dunes with ease while I struggled to keep pace. When I told him I’d never seen such large dunes, he chuckled. He told me stories of his childhood, when he climbed to their peak and rolled down their slopes — a detail I intentionally chose to keep in the story. Their cultural significance was as important as their environmental significance.

During my research, I sought a figure on how much of Goa’s dunes have been lost. There was no baseline data to calculate the loss. The most extensive, state-wide study was from 1998 by the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO). Subsequent studies are limited to small areas, and publicly available reports by government authorities have been accused of being faulty.

Emails, WhatsApp messages and calls to the communications department and a couple of individual scientists from the NIO went unanswered.

I think the most challenging part about reporting in Goa is that local knowledge is not always backed by publicly available data — or by data at all. I’m happy that this story is now co-published by Frontline.

In another story from Goa for a different publication, a scientist I spoke to told me about endangered mangrove species she had observed in a patch of wetland, which she recorded in a Google Drive. A beautification proposal for this wetland threatened to concretise it. Since the observations were not backed by publicly available studies, it was eventually removed.

Goa sits at that precarious spot, grappling with increasing pressures from tourism and settlers on one side, with policies and lobbyists pushing for the same, and a steady network of people fighting for their land, water and forests on the other. Reporting from within this conflict is, as I would call it, a rewarding challenge.

Warmly,
Lisann Dias,
Contributor

🏨 ICYMI: A Hilton Luxury Resort Closes In on Goa’s Sand Dunes

In a tourism-dependent Goa, resorts have long taken priority over residents. Now, that priority is reshaping the state’s coastline, threatening protected sand dunes that provide the first line of defence against coastal flooding and erosion.

This story is produced by The Xylom and co-published by Frontline, an Indian fortnightly magazine. Read more here.

🌞 NEWS BEHIND THE NEWS

• 🥒 Check out this feature by our outgoing intern Pragathi Ravi and Friend of the Xylom, Tom Brown, on Foreign Policy, The Illicit World of Sea Cucumbers!

• ⛰️ Last month, we published a dispatch by tanka dhakal and Manish Aryal from Rasuwa District, Nepal, “How Did The Nepal-Tibet Floods Become This Deadly?”

  And now for Science News, here’s our contributor Saugat Bolakhe’s take: “In the wake of the flood, could Nepal avert the next disaster?”

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