Living with water: Listening to rivers and wetlands is no longer optional in Goa

Amisha Shetgaonkar, a resident of Morjim, remembers when the seasons set the rhythm of her village. Tides marked fishing hours, monsoons dictated repair work, and fresh water from wells and springs lasted through the year. Today, she watches untreated sewage flow into the same waters that draw millions of tourists to Goa’s beaches. “The sea hasn’t changed, but everything around it has,” she said.

Goa’s coastline is at a critical point, with tourism overwhelming a fragile coastal system, leaving beaches polluted and water unsafe. Recent monitoring by the Goa State Pollution Control Board has found faecal coliform levels at popular beaches such as Morjim, Arambol, Calangute and Baga far exceeding safe limits. This is largely due to sewage infrastructure that is unable to cope with seasonal tourist inflows. At the same time, nearly a quarter of Goa’s shoreline is affected by erosion, accelerated by the destruction of sand dunes and adjoining mangroves to make way for resorts, shacks and coastal roads.

For communities, these changes are environmental indicators that translate into daily disruption. Rising sea levels and water temperatures, coupled with erratic monsoons, have altered fish migration patterns, reducing traditional catches of mackerel and sardines. Warming waters and pollution have allowed invasive species to replace familiar stocks, destabilising livelihoods that depend on seasonal predictability. “Fishing used to follow the weather; now even the seasons don’t behave the way they used to,” said Shetgaonkar.

Mangroves that once buffered villages from storms and flooding along rivers are shrinking under pressure from construction and land reclamation. Their loss has made estuaries and coastlines more vulnerable to erosion and has damaged breeding grounds for fish and nesting sites for Olive Ridley turtles. What remains is a coastline increasingly engineered for short-term tourism, while the ecological systems that sustained it for generations collapse.

Rivers under strain

Further inland, the crisis follows the rivers.

Nisha Chari has been researching the Chapora River since a bridge began construction near her village in Ibrahampur, where the river enters Goa. What she documents is not just erosion, but how quickly a river can unravel when infrastructure arrives without regard for flow, sediment or people. “After the monsoons, the banks started collapsing, trees fell in, fields disappeared. What used to be stable land now shifts every monsoon.”

Across Goa, the rivers that sustained agriculture, fishing, and drinking water are now under additional pressures from untreated sewage, mining runoff, sand extraction and rapid urban expansion. Multiple surveys, including findings from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in 2023 and 2024 indicated to increased biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and the presence of harmful pathogens in the seawater.

These indicators simply mean that Goa’s waters are hazardous for swimming, water sports, and marine life. Studies by the National Institute of Oceanography have also confirmed widespread microplastic pollution in major estuaries such as the Mandovi, Zuari, Sal, and Terekhol, with fibres and fragments entering the food chain through commercially important fish.

These surface impacts on water are closely tied to what is happening underground. Despite receiving heavy rainfall, Goa is increasingly facing summer water shortages. Intense, erratic and short-duration monsoon rains produce runoff rather than recharge, while widespread construction on laterite plateaus — traditionally the state’s natural groundwater sponges — prevents percolation. As a result, wells that once supplied homes now run dry or turn saline by late summer, forcing communities to depend on tankers, even in water-rich talukas.

In the Mhadei-Mandovi basin, the river is heavily overburdened as it carries sewage from expanding villages, hotels and restaurants, silt from mining belts, and debris from construction sites, while simultaneously supplying potable water to a growing urban population. Further south, industrial discharge and invasive water hyacinth choke the River Sal, disrupting navigation and depleting oxygen levels critical for aquatic life. For villages and communities along these rivers, the consequences are cumulative. 

Erosion eats into farmland, polluted water threatens health, and the loss of fish affects food security and income. “The river is treated like a drain, but for us, it is land, water, food and memory together,” said Chari.

Goa’s water crisis has little to do with rainfall. It stems from how rivers, groundwater and land are planned, and from whose voices are sidelined in those decisions.

Bhushana Thakur grew up in Pernem, bordering the khazan lands — low-lying fields protected by earthen bunds and sluice gates that regulate the movement of salt and fresh water. For generations, these landscapes absorbed monsoon floods, supported rice cultivation, fish farming and salt production, and buffered villages from tidal surges. “They are working food systems, not empty lands,” she said.

Wetlands under pressure

Today, many of Goa’s wetlands and khazans are disappearing under concrete-driven development. Untreated wastewater from nearby settlements flows into lakes and low-lying fields, triggering eutrophication and killing aquatic life. In former mining belts and rapidly urbanising areas, siltation has reduced the water-holding capacity of wetlands, leading to flooding during the monsoon and water scarcity in summer, a paradox repeated across the state.

Despite being among the most effective flood buffers and groundwater recharge zones, wetlands are often viewed as land available for development, making them vulnerable to landfilling for roads, housing and tourism infrastructure. Feeder streams are diverted, bunds are breached or neglected, and along rivers the delicate balance between fresh and tidal water is lost. As Thakur explained, “Once a sluice gate breaks or is blocked, the entire system collapses. Salinity enters the fields, crops fail and local people leave”.

The erosion of khazan systems is not only ecological but cultural. Salt pans that once supplied local markets are vanishing, along with the skills needed to maintain bunds, manage sluice gates and read tidal cycles. As younger generations are pushed out by declining livelihoods and rising land values, the knowledge that sustained these landscapes for centuries is disappearing.

Mangroves, which anchor khazan embankments and protect riverbanks from erosion, face similar pressures from embankment concretisation, jetties, aquaculture expansion, pollution and unregulated construction. Their loss increases vulnerability to storm surges and rising seas, while destroying breeding grounds for fish and crabs that sustain both inland and coastal communities.

Manisha Rodrigues, an architect mapping the Mhadei-Mandovi with her students from the Goa College of Architecture, emphasised: “what is called development often treats khazans and wetlands as obstacles, but when they disappear, floods become disasters and drinking water becomes scarce”. In a warming climate, the collapse of these systems exposes the cost of planning that ignores how water actually moves — across seasons, through land and within communities that have long managed it.

Listening to water stories

Shetgaonkar, Chari, Thakur and Rodrigues are part of the cohort behind Goa Water Stories, a community-led documentation project and online archive. The project brings together lived experience, ecological knowledge and geospatial data to record rivers, wells, wetlands, springs and coastlines as everyday systems shaped by human decisions rather than abstract resources. Built through long-term engagement with local residents, researchers, artists and students, Goa Water Stories combines oral histories with field observation, spatial mapping and publicly available data.

By centring community voices, the project challenges extractive models of research that document crisis without accountability. The work combines documentation of loss with an effort to clarify the interconnections between water, ecology, livelihoods and governance, offering a grounded archive for advocacy, policy and future planning in a rapidly changing coastal state.

Goa’s water crisis is often described as a problem of mismanaged scarcity, but the evidence tells a different story. The state receives abundant rainfall and is threaded by rivers, wetlands and a long coastline. This is a failure of governance, marked by planning that fragments ecosystems, marginalises community knowledge, and favours short-term growth and profit over long-term resilience.

From eroding beaches and polluted rivers to collapsing khazan lands, the patterns are connected. When dunes are flattened, rivers silt up. When wetlands are filled and plateaus destroyed, floods intensify and groundwater disappears. These are not isolated failures, but the cumulative cost of treating water as infrastructure rather than ecology.

As climate change amplifies monsoon extremes and sea-level rise, Goa’s future will depend on whether its water systems are repaired as living networks. For those who live along coasts, rivers and wetlands, water is lived reality. Recognising this knowledge is essential. The choice is stark: manage water as an afterthought, or rebuild governance around the flows that sustain the state.

Goa Water Stories is a collaboration with the Living Waters Museum, the Centre for Public Policy and Governance at the Goa Institute of Management, the Goa University and the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts.

Wenceslaus Mendes is an independent researcher, documentary filmmaker and curator.

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth