A beautiful resistance: How art, science and law saved Goa’s forests
- Written by Rishu Nigam
- Illustration by Alia Sinha
- Edited by Ankita Anand
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Key strategy: Conservation
Conservation relates to political advocacy, organizing and lobbying to preserve nature or natural resources and protect them from extraction or exploitation by humans.
Key strategy: Strategic Litigation
Strategic litigation (or impact litigation) refers to legal actions used to bring about broader social change. A lawsuit targets a policy or practice, forcing courts to rule on whether it is lawful, and so setting precedent for all those affected by the policy/practice.
Key tactic: Digital Activism
Digital or online activism involves using digital tools—like social media, petitions, or messenging apps —to organize supporters and advocate for environmental change. It can help groups reach international audiences and evade censorship by traditional media.
Key tactic: Protest Art
To mobilize the public, raise awareness, and provide imagery for protest actions, political movements often utilize posters, logos, and stylized slogans. These can themselves utilize humor, mockery, grief, or other tools in the artistic arsenal.
Key tactic: Peace March
An organized, non-violent procession of protesters, intending to draw attention to a cause or to pressure decision-makers to take a certain course of action on a conflict or social issue.
“It’s a forest literally made of magic: glowing mushrooms, flying lizards and ancient trees. This is Goa's inheritance, passed down for generations.”
It was a rare physical meeting at a café amidst a raging pandemic. Artist Svabhu Kohli sat across from three women whom they vaguely knew. There was fellow artist Trisha Dias Sabir, Nandini Velho, a well-known wildlife biologist, and Gabriella D’Cruz, a marine conservationist. The matter was urgent. Three massive infrastructure projects threatened to raze swathes of forest on the outskirts of Goa.
Five years later, Kohli remembers the meeting vividly. It felt like déjà vu. From their childhood in Dehli Aravalis to college in Bangalore, urban sprawl had repeatedly devoured the farms and forests around him. Now, in Goa, where they had found home, purpose and peace as a queer artist, it was happening again.
Mollem National Park and Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary are among the largest protected areas of Goa, in the middle of India’s Western Ghats mountain range – a 150-million-year-old ecosystem which is among the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Bordering the Kali Tiger Reserve in Karnataka, they serve as a crucial habitat corridor for tigers, and are home to hundreds of plant and wildlife species, many of them endemic and some endangered.
The forests also serve as catchment areas of rainwater, the source of rivers and streams that sustain a large part of Goa’s population. They are home to nearly 4,000 indigenous people, whose food, livelihoods and identity are deeply intertwined with the ecosystem. “It’s a forest literally made of magic: glowing mushrooms, flying lizards and ancient trees,” Kohli says. “This is Goa’s inheritance, passed down for generations.”
The three proposed projects – the expansion of a highway, the doubling of a railway line and a new power transmission line – were set to tear through this precious ecosystem, bringing down 59,000 ancient trees. The Goa Foundation, an NGO headed by veteran activist Claude Alvares, was challenging projects under India’s Wildlife Protection Act at High Court and Supreme Court. For Alvares, this was familiar ground: he and his lawyer wife, Norma, had been battling powerful lobbies to protect Goa’s people and environment since the mid-1980s.
But beyond the courtrooms, legal challenges alone wouldn’t win the fight without popular support. That’s where Team Mollem came in – a group of millennials and young people who told Mollem’s story through art, music and science, combining creative expression with hard data. “The lines blurred. Who was a scientist, who was an artist? It didn’t matter. We were citizens living in and wanting a democratic world,” Kohli says.
Undetected and illegal
We, the residents of Goa, fully oppose the 3 infra projects that will spell doom for close to 70,000 trees in #MyMollem @DrPramodPSawant
— Save Mollem | ❌Amka Naka Double Tracking❌ (@savemollemgoa) November 1, 2020
The photos show the damage already done in private forests in Mollem to build a substation for the 400kv transmission line project. Please RT pic.twitter.com/ro6IvBCngi
Nandini Velho was among the first to bring the Mollem projects into national focus. In May 2020, she wrote a scathing article for The Hindu detailing how India’s Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) discussed nearly 30 “development” projects in virtual meetings during the lockdown, bypassing due process and targeting some of India’s most ecologically sensitive regions. The projects in Goa were among those the MoEFCC had quietly given official clearance.
The government claimed these ‘development projects’ were essential for Goa’s electricity and transport needs. But locals and environmentalists believed the real motive of the projects lay in facilitating coal transport to steel and thermal plants owned by corporate giants in neighboring states. Their combined infrastructure would carve through 170 hectares of forest.
Just as the scandal was coming to light, reports emerged that an area of forest had already been felled in Sangod, on the outskirts of Mollem. On a scorching afternoon, Gabriella D’Cruz went to investigate. She drove down a tiny road through the forest, until it abruptly opened to a vast, barren expanse. The sight was surreal. “It was like someone took a shaving machine and went over this large patch of forest,” she recalls.
Nearly 2,670 trees had been felled to make space for a substation linked to the electricity transmission line. A dense forest with a thick canopy required a clear set of environmental clearances, none of which the electricity company had obtained. D’cruz returned with footage of Sangod’s missing forest and shared it with Velho. Later, drone images showed a deforested patch shaped like a heart – a stark brown wound carved out of the green forests.
“This was a call to action,” Velho says. “People realized this is what is going to happen to the rest of our forest. This had gone undetected, and it was illegal.” That evening, Velho and D’cruz met with Kohli and Dias Sabir for their first meeting at the café. The two scientists and two artists laid the foundation of what would become one of India’s most significant citizen-led pushbacks against top-down decision-making. They called it Amche Mollem (My Mollem).
Art, science and online resistance
Amche Mollem was conceptualized as a campaign to rekindle people’s emotional connection to the forest. Its first callouts – Magical Mollem and Memories of Mollem – invited Goans to share personal stories of the forest that had shaped their childhood. Kohli and Dias Sabir launched a toolkit containing key facts and visual assets to help people create their own art. The goal was to build a campaign where “you didn’t need any label or entry level to have a voice,” Velho explains.
At the same time, over 150 scientists wrote to the environment minister raising concerns over the projects’ approvals. With physical protests nearly impossible during the pandemic, the campaign mobilized online. Within a month, more than 70,000 people had signed a Change.org petition, with several thousand more sending emails and signing additional petitions urging policymakers to act.
As the campaign gained momentum, Team Mollem branched into nine specialized sub-teams covering art, science, law, writing, press and social media. Forty young volunteers worked in a virtual war room, with Alvares and his colleagues solidly behind them.
To engage politicians, they rolled out a drive called Ask Your MLA, which put out a set of pointed questions about the three projects that citizens could pose to Members of the Legislative Assembly, urging their elected representatives to raise these issues at the assembly. They also introduced ‘legislative bingo’ – a checklist of actions such as emailing an MLA, watching assembly sessions and sharing updates – and infographics mapping which MLAs remained silent, who asked questions, and who wrote to authorities like the Supreme Court-appointed Central Empowered Committee (CEC) or the National Board for Wildlife.
D’Cruz joined the legal team, meeting the Goa Foundation’s legal experts and simplifying complex legal processes into bite-sized information for art, press and social media teams. “If I could understand what Claude or Norma were saying, I could make it accessible to others who didn’t have a legal background,” she explains.
Velho, meanwhile, sought scientists out to review the three projects’ flawed environmental impact assessments (EIAs). Over a few weeks, 30 scientists specializing in the Western Ghat ecosystem broke down the EIA reports and exposed glaring loopholes. This critical analysis became a pivotal piece of work that strengthened legal arguments in court – and provided artists with a wealth of material to deconstruct for the public.
Artist Jayee Borcar transformed a technical note on forest fragmentation into single, striking visual that illustrated the fracturing of the ecosystem: severed wildlife corridors, roadkill of displaced animals, and the struggle of fragmented forests to regenerate.
One of Velho’s scientific colleagues, river ecologist Rhea Lopez, analyzed how “linear intrusions” like highways and railway tracks would disrupt wildlife corridors, force arboreal species onto the ground and increase roadkill. Lopez then moved to communications and wrote poem-riddles for Missing Species, a series of artworks that put the spotlight on major species deliberately omitted from the EIA reports. Lopez says it was “about making science meaningful – science that makes sense to people and is for people.”
The Case of the Missing Species unfolded as an interactive public art installation. Four towering cutouts of missing species – the flying lizard, the Indian bison, flowering begonias and a dragonfly – were put up in the Jardim Garcia de Orta in the heart of Goa’s Panjim city. Team Mollem invited people, including children, to write postcards, thousands of postcards that filled the cut-outs, with 600 of them dispatched to the Prime Minister’s office.
Apurva Kulkarni, an art historian from Goa who had been closely following Amche Mollem, launched an online art residency, Mandalas for Mollem, that resulted in provocative drawings, sculpture, installations – and even a living terrarium that recreated the Mollem forest in a glass bowl. What was special about the movement, Kulkarni says, was how it empowered artists of all backgrounds. “I have been an art curator, a teacher, a critic – a gatekeeper extraordinaire,” he says wryly, “but the purpose of the Mollem exercise was different. Symbolism was the primary thing, not style or quality.”
A people’s campaign
“At some point, the art fervor took on a life of its own, and we began receiving a wave of creative responses—the floodgates had opened,” Kohli says. From the outset, Amche Mollem was clear that it would continue Goa’s long history of citizen movements, and would not center a single leader. “It would be disingenuous for any of us to claim we were awakening citizenship when we were simply standing on the shoulders of those before us,” Velho reasons.
They framed the ‘ideal campaigner’ as someone who sees the work of standing up and using their voice as normal – not a hero or a martyr’s job. “The success of our movement will be seen when one doesn’t feel the need to applaud such actions but finds it weird when people don’t take action,” an Amche Mollem social media post explained.
Self-care also featured as an explicit value. The team knew they would be trolled, attacked and pressured for immediate reactions. “Our value was simple: get eight hours of sleep and then come back to the question,” Velho says. Safety was prioritized. Anyone participating in protests was made aware of their rights, trained on handling police custody and backed by a team of lawyers on standby.
The activists say what truly bound the movement together was friendship, trust and a deep sense of collective purpose. “There were a lot more women and queer people in the team,” D’Cruz says. Avoiding patriarchal power structures was key: “There was less ego, less power and no hankering to be the first or the best,” she recalls.
As Amche Mollem’s Instagram feed exploded with art – hand-painted masks, poems in Konkani and beautiful protest songs – the campaign ignited internationally. Lerrick and Lineker Coelho, Goan contestants on the British TV show Bake Off, crafted a fruit chocolate crumble symbolizing Mollem’s deforestation. Back home, their creation set off a Bake for Mollem drive, with people designing cakes in the form of jungled landscapes and animals.
“Suddenly, families were sitting together and talking about what’s happening to their home. Art gave this incredible agency to people,” Kohli says.
Taking to the streets
Social media, online action and virtual residencies allowed a mass movement to come together even as the pandemic made public assembly difficult – and sparked sympathetic campaigns across Goa.
Father Bolmax, a parish priest in the village of Chicalim, got involved after he learned about the protest letter signed by 150 scientists. Having grown up in a farming family surrounded by an idyllic landscape, his connection to land and forest ran deep. He began incorporating protest jingles, messages and the campaign toolkit into the church’s livestream service, urging people to send out emails to concerned officials.
When the lockdown eased, Father Bolmax was among the first to take the campaign offline. Joining a host of environmental and civil society groups under the name Goencho Ekvott (Unity of Goa), he called on activists and citizens to join a peace march on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary. Over 65 kilometers – from the hills of Mollem to the port at Vasco – hundreds of people joined the march, walking through their own village and handing it on to the next.
As the march ended, Alvares told Father Bolmax, “You fight on the road, I will fight in the court,” the priest recalls. Bolmax took up the challenge, mobilizing the Chicalim Farmer’s Youth Club – a group he had mentored during the pandemic – to organize flash mobs, drawing stunned onlookers to their performance. Captain Viriato Fernandes, a senior activist, would then step in to explain the impact of the three projects, and especially their link to coal transportation.
Over months, youth club members say they performed in nearly 100 villages, sparking a ripple effect. Other villages began staging their own flash mobs, and the movement reached elders and communities who were unaware of its online campaigns. Protests swelled from a few dozen youth to mass demonstrations.
The Battle of Chandor
On November 1, thousands of Goans camped overnight at the railway track in Chandor, a key site for the double-tracking of the railway line. It became a night of celebration, filled with music, a candlelight vigil, folk dances and shared food – despite several activists later being charged with rioting and unlawful assembly, cases they continue to fight to this day. Elderly women from Chandor urged the protestors: “Be ready to give up everything for what you believe in.”
The Battle of Chandor, as it came to be known, forced the national media to take notice. It also upped the stakes, provoking a backlash from the state. On 19 December 2020, Goa’s Liberation Day, the President of India was visiting the state, and the movement faced its harshest crackdown yet.
Amche Mollem and other key players in the campaign planned to gather at Panjim Church Square. The Chicalim Youth Club were ready to perform their usual flash mob. But before they could reach Panjim, their bus was intercepted, diverted, and sent miles away to a police station in Ponda.
Meanwhile at the church square, the police were rounding up protesters. Protestors, including children, sheltered in church hall where they drew, sang – and stayed put. More joined in as word spread. Police trucks rolled in and officers moved in to detain protesters.
At the Ponda police station, Father Bolmax and Captain Viriato demanded the release of the Chicalim Youth Club members. “Take our names, not theirs,” they insisted. Among those standing with the youth was 48-year-old Julio Cedric Aguiar, a dedicated activist working closely with both the Goa Foundation and Amche Mollem. Around midnight, Aguiar called his wife, Sonia, to inform her that he was at the police station and wouldn’t leave until Bolmax and Viriato were released. It was well past midnight when everyone was finally set free.
Have we done enough?
“The Ministry of Railways or RVNL [Rail Vikas Nigam Limited] have failed to provide any substantial basis for the requirement of doubling the railway line."
In January 2021, the Supreme Court responded to the Goa Foundation’s case by sending the Central Empowered Committee – which had already received hundreds of submissions from scientists, wildlife experts and citizen groups opposing the three projects – to make a site visit.
When Alvares arrived with Aguiar to meet the CEC officials, he was overwhelmed by the scene before him. He called Velho, telling her: “There are two of us and about 20 government cars.” Officials from railway authorities, the forest department and project representatives from Karnataka and Goa had turned up in full force, overshadowing the citizens’ delegation. Alvares summoned Velho, and she and her colleagues were granted the very last meeting of the visit.
With only a few minutes to make their case, they focused on the scientific evidence –particularly the misinformation in the EIA reports – backing up every concern they raised with scientific data, maps, and drone photography. Velho recalls doubt creeping in as they left the meeting. Had she said enough? Could they have done better?
It would be months before she got her answer. In April 2021, the CEC delivered its findings and dealt a major blow to the railway double-tracking project, calling it “economically and ecologically unjustifiable.” The transmission line was ordered to follow an existing power line to avoid further damage to the protected forest, while the highway expansion was permitted only under stricter mitigation measures. Nearly a year later, the Supreme Court upheld these recommendations, effectively halting the railway project and imposing significant modifications on the other two.
Loss and legacy
"If your democracy is at stake, activism is the necessity everyone needs to partake in."
Barely a month after the CEC report was released, the campaign lost Aguiar, one if its biggest supporters. Mollem had been Aguiar’s childhood playground. When he threw himself into the fight to protect it, his wife Sonia has been dismayed: “I thought this was all politics, and I do not like politics,” she says. The day after he passed, she received a call from her sister in Dubai: “Just google him,” Sonia’s sister said. Sonia found the internet flooded with tributes to her husband.
For Alvares, a veteran activist who had spent decades petitioning in courts, Amche Mollem brought an unexpected dimension to the fight. “They knew nothing about the legal process, but they understood what they could do to assist the process,” he says. Alvares doesn’t know if the Goa Foundation would have won its case without My Mollem, but he believes the movement “influenced the Supreme Court’s proceedings.”
If there is a lesson to be learned from Mollem, Alvares says that before rushing to the courts, activists should ground their campaigns in local organizing. “Base yourself on popular support,” he advises. Or, as Velho describes the movement, in acts of “beautiful resistance.”
The timing of the whole affair during the pandemic allowed officials to covertly fast-track projects that should not have been approved. But lockdown also gave activists time and space to engage deeply in resisting them. D’Cruz notes the pandemic didn’t bring such opportunities for everyone. “It was a campaign run by young, privileged people who had the privilege of safety, a side income and an education that made us better at the art, science and law that we practiced,” she says. But using this privilege isn’t something she’s apologetic about: “If your democracy is at stake, activism is the necessity everyone needs to partake in.”
While Amche Mollem’s core team remains engaged in rights-based work, their involvement is now sporadic. They no longer have capacity to give the same time and energy. But the fight to protect Goa’s unique ecology is far from over. Lopez says Amche Mollem gave her a network and support system that allows her to work with other citizen-led groups to fight the destruction of Goa’s ancient river fisheries. “The influence is always going to be there. The campaign changed us fundamentally as people,” she says.
The Chicalim youth now have full-time jobs, but make time to work in the fields and keep alive the farming initiative Father Bolmax mentored. Bolmax himself now leads the Diocesan Commission for Ecology – a quiet endorsement of his work by the Church. And Team Mollem were recognized by the NGO Sanctuary Asia’s 2021 Wildlife Service Award. The trophy now sits in Sonia’s living room, in honor of a contribution that gave Aguiar’s life meaning. “Somehow, in those two years before he passed,” Sonia says, “he found his true self.”
About the Author
Rishu Nigam is a writer, trainer, and documentary filmmaker covering the climate crisis in India. Her films and field reporting spotlight community-led responses to climate vulnerability across coastal, mountain, and dryland regions. Over the years, she has trained multiple cohorts of young filmmakers, community storytellers, and local journalists to report from some of India’s most ecologically fragile areas. She is an accredited Solutions Journalism trainer, supporting others in telling rigorous stories of climate resilience.
