In 2020, lockdowns forced Indian startup Maker’s Asylum to make a tough choice: stay in expensive Mumbai and downsize, or move. The company, a community makerspace, relocated to Goa, the coastal state known for its idyllic beaches, laid-back lifestyle, and Portuguese colonial heritage.
Maker’s Asylum is now housed in a 100-year-old Portuguese mansion, on a leafy road in the village Moira, and it has flourished. The rent and electricity fees are a fraction of what the company paid in Mumbai, and it’s more popular among clients than it ever was in the big city. Every day, the mansion is filled with tech workers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts, building things together and attending workshops organized by the company. But Maker’s Asylum isn’t the only new arrival in Goa. The global remote working trend has brought a wave of Indian tech workers, foreign digital nomads, and other professionals to the state. Although many of the pandemic-era masses have left, plenty outsiders have stayed behind. Locals say they are changing Goa — for better and worse.
In just three years, several restaurants, Airbnbs, and hotels have opened up in Moira, Maker’s Asylum founder Vaibhav Chhabra told Rest of World. Rents have risen — Chhabra now pays double compared to when he first moved to Goa — and real estate construction has boomed. Many businesses have benefited from the influx. But the local population is having to contend with skyrocketing prices fueled by out-of-town salaries that eclipse their own.
Tech sector jobs are the biggest driver of Goa’s recent transformation. According to data shared by staffing firm Xpheno, software and IT services companies have grown their white-collar workforce the most, compared to other sectors in the state since 2021. Internet startups were among the fastest-growing sectors, creating 31% more jobs over the last two years. Earlier this year, state officials announced the construction of an information technology park that would be able to house as many as 200 startups in the coming years — Goa currently has 400 government-recognized startups.
“You walk into any cafe, you will see it filled with people working on their laptops,” Tejas Polli, who grew up in Goa and now works at a tech accelerator, told Rest of World. “The whole atmosphere around Goa is changing.”
Startup founders told Rest of World they were drawn to Goa for its reduced business costs, lower salaries, and better quality of life. Pratap Raju, who moved to Goa in 2020, runs Climate Collective from Porvorim near Goa. It’s a nonprofit that provides support to climate tech startups. “With the same rent as Mumbai, we got a four-times bigger office here,” he told Rest of World. Salaries for local hires are half those in India’s biggest cities, he estimated.
Most of Goa’s new residents are financially well-off. Mayur Sontakke runs NomadGao, a coworking and co-living space aimed at the global digital nomad community. His two Goa locations are both less than 2 kilometers away from the shore. “It’s not ideal to work from a beach. It’s sunny, noisy, and the drinks … all of it can make it distracting,” Sontakke told Rest of World. His customers include tech workers, consultants, and venture capitalists. They typically spend upwards of 50,000 rupees (around $600) for a month’s stay. He is booked out for most of the year.
In July 2019, Nihar Manwatkar started Clay, a coworking space and cafe in one of Goa’s most picturesque tourist hot spots, Anjuna. At the time, he wasn’t sure if it would prove sustainable. But just a year later, Clay had expanded beyond its colonial-era building to accommodate new customers. “On a usual day, we have 15–20 people who work from the cafe and spend 500 rupees ($6) a day for coworking and another 400–500 rupees on food and drinks,” Manwatkar told Rest of World.
The costs of running the business have grown steeply over the years. “When I moved to Goa five years back, [the monthly rent for] my two-bedroom apartment was 16,000 rupees ($192), which now costs 65,000 rupees ($782),” Manwatkar said.
The average monthly income in Goa is around 20,000 rupees ($200). Locals have found that their salaries no longer afford them what they used to. “It’s not so easy anymore,” Adam Tzur, a Goan software developer, told Rest of World. “Be it buying a plot of land or ordering food, everything is so expensive now.”
But Goa’s rise as a tech hub is unlikely to reverse. The state government wants to launch a digital nomad visa program, and Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has said that he envisions Goa becoming one of the world’s top 25 startup destinations by 2030. Rest of World reached out to the Goa Housing Board, the faction of the state government that looks at affordable housing, but didn’t get a response.
Entrepreneurs see the appeal. After Tarun Sharma, co-founder and CEO of direct-to-consumer personal care startup mCaffeine, moved his company’s headquarters from Mumbai to Goa last year, he has been able to focus more on work and less on what he calls “noise,” he told Rest of World.
“Of course I still map what my competitors are doing, but here I am not listening to things like who has a bigger office or who is raising the next round,” he said. “Instead, I could be meeting an ex-army officer and have other conversations.”
Be it buying a plot of land or ordering food, everything is so expensive now.”
His employees approve of the move. “We negotiate salaries based on bands, not cities,” Sharma said. “That means, the person working out of Goa has a better quality of life. So, people do not mind moving here for the job.”
But even some Goans who can afford the higher prices lament their state’s rapid growth. “These professionals moving here want the best of both worlds but that is changing the entirety of Goa,” Nissim D’Silva, a local who works remotely for Bengaluru-based edtech startup Ontum, told Rest of World.
The ubiquitous construction projects have been the most noticeable effect of the influx. “These are mostly luxury apartments which easily cost 1 to 3 crore rupees [$120,000–$360,000], and are only being purchased by professionals coming in from the metro cities who see this as a holiday home or an investment for rent or Airbnb,” D’Silva said. “The difference in stratas is quite visible in Goa now, which was not the case here before.”
As a child, Goa was where D’Silva spent his summer vacations. When he moved back in 2019, he returned to a different Goa. “Fifteen years back, we wouldn’t find dal or other cuisines in Goa; it would just be the local Konkani cuisine,” he said. “Today, there are so many options and it’s diversifying. Even the salesmen in the local stores now speak more Hindi rather than Konkani.”
Another complaint among Goans is that the new businesses don’t necessarily provide jobs for locals. There is a mismatch between the skills people have and those that newly arrived companies seek. “Hiring remains a major challenge,” said Climate Collective’s Raju. “Businesses that need to scale up cannot operate completely from Goa. It’s a difficult task.”
In March 2023, Goa’s unemployment rate stood at nearly 16%, double the national unemployment rate of about 8%, according to an analysis by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).
It took Polli, the tech accelerator worker, a year to find the right job after he graduated college with a business administration degree. “I was taking up part-time jobs, because I couldn’t find opportunities that would match my skills,” he said. “It was a similar experience for all my batchmates who did not move out of Goa.”
Software developer Tzur said it is much harder to find work in Goa compared to India’s bigger cities because locally, companies prefer to hire through their networks. The same job would earn him three times the salary in Bengaluru or Delhi. “The pay is terrible,” he said. Preferably, he’d like to work remotely for better pay. He’s looking into becoming a digital nomad.
