There are six river boat casinos in Goa, and for many years now the government has been eager to get them to move, in fact they have been pushing for them to take to the land in an area further inland. However, that appears to be something that may not happen.
Sudin Dhavalikar who is the Public Works Minister had decreed that they should be allowed to stay on the river and operating for at least another six months, in the hope a final decision on their relocation can be made at a later date.
This has though been an ongoing saga for many years now, and one final solution proposed was to force them to move to a new location by 2020, but that doesn’t look likely to happen and government sources believe it will be at least 2022 before they do move. This means every six months they will be given permission to stay for another six months.
As something of an incentive to get the river boat casinos to move on land, a guarantee has been forthcoming that licenses that are issued to their casino operators will be valid for at least 10 to 15 years, which gives them the option of planning for the long term.
Whilst the casino operators are somewhat wary to move ashore, fearing a downturn in income, comparisons have been made with riverboat casinos in Illinois which when they moved ashore the income generated by those now land based casino venues jumped by 25%.
One aspect of Goa’s gambling laws which is slightly different from most other gambling destinations is that they are only allowed to offer electronic games of chance but no physical card or table games.
