The comunidade and land nobody sells

In a Goan village there is land that cannot be sold. Not because of a zoning rule, or a ceiling on holdings, or a protection order — but because of who owns it. The soil belongs to a body called a comunidade, and the people who live on it own shares in the body, not the ground under their feet.

This is not a remnant kept alive by nostalgia. It is a functioning corporation with an assembly, an elected attorney, a treasurer, an administrator appointed by the state government, and a code of articles that runs to hundreds of sections. It has been operating since before the Portuguese arrived, and it is still, in many villages, the largest landlord.

A company whose business is land

The pre-Portuguese form was the gaunkari: the original settler families of a village held its land collectively, reclaimed the marshy ground behind bunds, leased plots by auction, and divided the proceeds among themselves. They also maintained the things that made the land productive — the bunds, the sluice gates, the canals, the temples — and paid the village's service castes in land or in grain.

When the Portuguese took over they did not abolish this. They codified it. The Code of Comunidades, signed on 15 April 1961 as Legislative Diploma No. 2070, turned the custom into articles: what the assembly may decide, what requires the administrator's consent, how a share is inherited, how land is leased, and how the dividend — jono — is distributed. Eight months later the Indian Army entered Goa, and the code survived the transfer of power because it was the only land record the new administration had.

What the code protects is subtle. A member does not own a plot. He owns a share in the body, which entitles him to a portion of its income and a vote in its assembly. He can sell the share, in some circumstances, to another member. He cannot sell the land, because the land is not his: it is the comunidade's, and the comunidade is not permitted to alienate it. That single separation — between the right to income and the right to the soil — is the whole mechanism.

What the land actually does

A comunidade's income comes from paddy fields leased to cultivators, from coconut and areca groves, from fishing rights in the canals, from the sluice gates that control water into the khazan fields, from market stalls, and in some villages from sand and stone. It pays a dividend to its shareholders, maintains the bunds, and — this is the part that explains its survival — keeps the water works that make the land farmable at all.

In other words the institution is a water management company that happens to own the soil. That is why three successive regimes kept it. A king wants revenue; a colonial administration wants records; a new state wants the fields to stay in production and the embankments maintained. All three are served by leaving the arrangement alone. The comunidade is not a survival from an older economy. It is a piece of infrastructure that was too useful to dismantle.

Who was not a member

The honest part of the story is the membership. The gaunkars were the original settler families, by descent. Dalit households, the tribal communities of the hills, and — with local exceptions — women were not members. They cultivated comunidade land as tenants, worked it as labourers, and had no share and no vote. The "commons" was common for a defined group, and the definition was genealogical.

This matters for how the institution should be described. It was not a village republic in which everyone held a piece. It was a closed corporation with a large tenant class underneath it, and the closure is part of the reason it lasted: a body with two hundred shareholders and clear rules is easier to defend than an open field that anyone may use. Common land and open land are not the same thing, and the difference is a membership register.

The slow conversion

What is happening now is not an abolition. It is a series of amendments, each of which looks technical. In June 2023 the code was changed to allow the suspension of a managing committee pending an inquiry, and to let landless shareholders apply for land. In March 2024 it was changed again so that a comunidade must obtain the government's approval before it can file, withdraw or compromise a suit — a requirement added after a tribunal declined to hear a compromise for want of exactly that approval. In August 2024 a further amendment allowed the state to declare a comunidade "in default" if it fails to hold elections within sixty days, and to appoint a local revenue officer as custodian for the term.

Each has a stated reason, and several are defensible. The direction, though, is consistent: a self-governing corporation is being turned into a regulated trust, and a regulated trust is one step from ordinary property. The most striking effect has been unintended. When it became possible for the state to put a custodian in charge of a dormant body, villages that had not held an election in thirty years suddenly held one. The threat did what no appeal to tradition could: it produced a quorum.

Why it is defended

The defence is not nostalgia and it is not anti-development. It is an observation about what happens next. If the land becomes ordinary title, it can be sold, and in Goa land near a beach or a highway is worth more as a plot than as a paddy field. The village would get a one-time payment and lose the asset permanently. The comunidade is the only thing standing between a village and the market, and it holds that position because it is a legal person with a lawyer, not because it is sacred.

That is the real lesson of the institution, and it is not a romantic one. A commons survives if someone holds the title and someone else can sue on it. It does not survive on goodwill, and it does not survive on the beauty of the custom. Five centuries of continuity here were produced by paperwork: a code with articles, an assembly with minutes, a tribunal with jurisdiction.

The oldest awkward corporation

So the smallest unit of public life in a Goan village turns out to be a corporation that predates the joint-stock company, owns a third of the state, pays dividends, maintains embankments, and cannot sell its own soil. It is awkward for everybody: for a state that would like a clean land market, for developers, for the shareholders who would like to cash out, and for the tenants who were never on the register.

It is also, quietly, the most direct answer this country has to a question that comes up everywhere else: who owns the ground, and by what right. In most of India the answer is a title deed and a court. In 223 Goan villages the answer is a body of shareholders, a five-step procedure, and a code signed in the last months of a dying empire — which nobody has yet managed to replace with anything better.

This is entry 12 of Everyday Life in About India. The pillar's argument — that ordinary arrangements explain more than monuments — is set out on the pillar page.