PRAJYOT MAINKAR
Goa has spent decades selling sunsets. Now it’s trying to sell something harder to package: a future. There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that hits you when an IT Minister talks about Gen Z redefining careers, and he is standing in a beach shack in Baga.
That was the scene on May 21, when Goa hosted the inaugural Shackathon at Baga Beach – a two-day government-organised event that pulled in over 500 participants from across the country. The idea sounds like something a marketing intern might float and immediately regret. Laptops and coconut water. Disruption with a side of prawn curry.
Strip away the optics, and something more serious is happening. Goa, for the first time in recent memory, is publicly interrogating its own economic identity. Not through a committee report buried in a government PDF. Through an event. One that asks a question the state has quietly avoided: what exactly does Goa build?
The dependency nobody names
The tourism problem is not unique to Goa, but Goa wears it more visibly than most. Tourism contributes 16.43% to the state’s GDP and keeps between 40 and 45 per cent of all direct and indirect employment afloat. That is a staggering concentration of weight in a single sector – seasonal, climate-sensitive and increasingly reliant on charter flights from Russia and Central Asia to stay buoyant.
The deeper wound is quieter. For years, Goa’s most ambitious young people have done what young people do when opportunity dries up at home: they leave. Bengaluru. Pune. Mumbai. The irony is acute. A state that attracts millions of visitors every year could not hold its own talent. The message was never stated but always understood – Goa is where you unwind, not where you build.
Why the shack is the point
Day one brought together startup founders, AI practitioners and builders under the theme ‘Hustle and High Tides.’ Day two, ‘Creators and Coastlines,’ shifted toward designers, freelancers and the emerging creator economy. A live hackathon ran alongside, with participants identifying and solving real problem statements through technology.
I spoke at the inaugural session, and the energy in that shack was not staged. Something genuine was being attempted – and the credit for that sits with D.S. Prashant and the SITPC team, Kabir Shirgaonkar and DITE&C, Praveen Volvotkar of ITG Goa, and the political conviction of IT Minister Rohan Khaunte and Chief Minister Pramod Sawant to back it.
Hackathons happen everywhere. What makes this one interesting is the venue itself. The shack. The beach. The place that, to most of India, represents leisure at its most guilt-free.
The government is not really asking whether you can write code near the ocean. It is challenging a much older assumption – that serious work requires miserable conditions. Grey cubicles. Traffic. Cities that punish you for living in them.
The global race
The competition here is not domestic. Bali figured this out years ago. So did Lisbon and Chiang Mai. These places don’t just share a coastline and low living costs. They made a conscious, deliberate choice to treat remote workers as a genuine economic asset worth building for – rolling out proper visas, co-working hubs, and reliable broadband that said: “This is permanent, not some temporary experiment.”
These places understood that a new class of worker had emerged – not a tourist, not a traditional resident, but something between. Someone who stays three months, rents locally, eats out five nights a week and does not need to be sold on the destination because the destination is the reason they came.
This demographic spends more and multiplies. One founder who builds something meaningful here talks about it. Others follow. The model works. The question is whether Goa can sustain it – and that requires more than one annual event. It means fibre that does not collapse in the monsoon. Co-working infrastructure beyond the tourist belt. Goa currently has 635 DPIIT-registered startups, with Rs. 3.9 crore disbursed to 147 beneficiaries so far – numbers that signal intent but also reveal how much ground remains.
The real audience
The human dimension here is easy to miss.
The real audience of Shackathon may not be the outsiders it is trying to attract. It may be Goans themselves – the ones who stayed, the ones who left, the ones currently weighing a Bengaluru offer. Telling that audience, through a public act, that the state sees a different future for itself is not nothing.
Policy signals matter. Not because they transform reality overnight, but because they shift what people believe is possible.
More than a moment
None of this means Shackathon will transform Goa. One event cannot do that. What it can do is open a conversation that has been too polite to happen – that tourism, as miraculous as it has been, is not an identity. It is an industry. And industries, however beloved, are not destinies.
The boldest thing Goa has done in years may not be anything coded by the sea. It may simply be admitting, in public, that it wants to become something more.
Reinvented cities like Medellín and Tallinn didn’t do it with one event – they kept deciding the old story wasn’t enough.
