Goa's Feni GI May 'Outlaw' Neighbourhood Bhaticars
By Gajanan Khergamker
When the Goa Excise Department declared that by March 2025 GI-certified Feni would be available on store shelves to coincide with the cashew season, the news was met with applause. After all, here was a local spirit, unique to Goa, stepping onto the world stage with the legitimacy of law.
Feni, long celebrated in song, ritual and casual conversation, would now be backed by the seal of a Geographical Indication—a mark intended to protect authenticity and ward off imitation. For policymakers, the move seemed a triumph. For tourists, a reassurance. For exporters, an opportunity.
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| A Goan woman collecting Feni in a plastic container (All Rights Reserved) |
But as so often happens when law meets lived tradition, the reality is less straightforward. The very instrument designed to protect Goa’s heritage, the GI Act of 1999, now risks disenfranchising the very men and women who have kept that heritage alive.
Beneath the glossy promise of certified bottles lies a stark truth: the small-time producers, the village bhaticars who distil Feni in smoky backyards, may find themselves branded inauthentic by a law drafted in their name.
The Bhaticar’s Predicament
The life of a bhaticar follows the rhythm of the cashew harvest. Cashew apples are gathered in orchards by families and neighbours, the juice crushed by hand or wooden presses, and poured into earthen pots. Distilling takes place in copper stills, heated over wood fires.
The process is not merely industrial; it is cultural, communal, almost ceremonial. The Feni produced rarely travels far. A few barrels are sold to the local bar, some bottles saved for weddings or feasts, the rest consumed in the village.
For these men and women, Feni is not a brand but a way of life. Yet, under the regime of GI certification, their produce risks invisibility. Lacking the resources, literacy, or bureaucratic know-how to obtain registration, they cannot affix the prized logo.
Their Feni, however genuine, is denied legitimacy in the market. Bars catering to tourists, enticed by the sheen of certified bottles, may abandon the bhaticar for suppliers whose paperwork is in order. In effect, the law transforms them from custodians of tradition into outlaws of bureaucracy.
One elderly distiller in Salcete, who has made Feni for decades, admits he cannot read the forms required for certification, let alone pay the fees. His son, a taxi driver, has no time to shuttle between government offices. “We make Feni the way our fathers did,” he says, “but who will buy from us now?”
Another in Bardez, who sells a few hundred litres each season to a neighbourhood bar, fears he will lose his only customer once GI-certified bottles arrive. His Feni, unchanged for generations, suddenly loses worth—not because of its quality but because of its lack of a legal stamp.
The Law’s Betrayal of Its Spirit
The Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999 was never intended to create such hierarchies. Its purpose was protective: to safeguard community heritage from counterfeiters and misappropriators.
A GI was meant to celebrate the collective, not privilege the individual. Yet, in Goa’s interpretation, the Act is being enforced with a rigidity that undermines its social intent.
Instead of inclusivity, the GI becomes exclusive. Instead of protecting every distiller within Goa’s borders, it legitimises only those who can afford to comply. Instead of levelling the playing field, it tilts it decisively in favour of the privileged few. The irony is glaring: the law meant to empower the poor risks rendering them invisible.
Lessons From Precedent
The irony of India’s Geographical Indications law lies in the cruel distance between its avowed purpose and its lived application. Conceived ostensibly to protect the poor artisan, the humble farmer, the fragile custodian of ethnic craft, it has over the years morphed into a fortress accessible only to those with the means, the paperwork, the political clout and the legal stamina to scale its walls.
The very people for whom the legislation was designed — the illiterate weaver, the subsistence farmer, the tribal cultivator — find themselves deprived of rights to creations born of their sweat and inherited through generations.
This inversion of purpose is no accident. It is the predictable outcome of a system that prizes compliance over culture, documentation over lived tradition, and registration over recognition.
This contradiction, as seen in Goa with the Feni controversy, is hardly unique. Across India, the courts have repeatedly been called upon to interpret disputes where the GI law has faltered in protecting those most in need of its shelter.
One of the earliest cautionary tales emerged in Tea Board of India v. ITC Ltd. (2011), where the Calcutta High Court was confronted with the question of whether ITC’s use of “Darjeeling Lounge” for its luxury hotels infringed upon the Darjeeling tea GI. The Tea Board, as custodian of the GI, argued that any such use diluted the sanctity of the mark.
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A similar disillusionment struck the weavers of Varanasi when the Banarasi Saree was conferred GI protection. Instead of heralding dignity and economic revival, the regime became a gatekeeping device.
Only those formally registered as weavers or traders could legitimately use the GI tag. This meant thousands of artisans, labouring in dimly lit rooms, eking out livelihoods in obscurity and poverty, were shut out of the very system that was supposed to recognise their craft.
Illiterate, undocumented, and living outside the pale of officialdom, they were effectively criminalised for continuing their own centuries-old vocation.
The backlash led to litigation and protests, demanding inclusivity. Here again, the rigidity of law clashed violently with the spirit of justice, exposing how a framework meant to empower was co-opted to exclude.
The plight of Kondapalli toy-makers in Andhra Pradesh tells the same story. Though the toys, carved from softwood and painted in distinctive hues, won GI recognition, the majority of artisans remained invisible to the process.
The “authorised users” were often traders or associations with access to legal mechanisms.
Poor craftsmen, bound by caste and geography to the trade, discovered that their heritage had been appropriated by middlemen. Their toys fetched premium prices in urban markets, stamped with the GI label, yet the craftsman himself was denied both dignity and remuneration.
Equally illustrative is the experience of Channapatna toy-makers in Karnataka. Once celebrated as “Gombegala Ooru” or “toy town,” the community found itself fractured after GI registration.
Traders and exporters quickly consolidated control, while women and small-scale artisans, the true keepers of the tradition, languished without recognition.
To this day, the GI has not translated into tangible empowerment for those at the margins.
The saga repeats itself across textiles, beverages, agricultural produce and handicrafts. Be it the tussle over “Hyderabadi Haleem,” where hoteliers fought bitterly for exclusive rights to a centuries-old dish born of collective cultural practice, or the tribulations of Madhubani painters in Bihar, where commercial outfits usurped the GI benefits while village women who had painted on walls and cloth for generations remained outside the fold — the pattern is unmistakable. The GI system, far from being a leveller, has entrenched hierarchies.
Courts, to their credit, have occasionally stepped in to highlight the absurdities. In Tea Board of India v. ITC Ltd., the Calcutta High Court pointedly reminded litigants that GIs were not trademarks to be policed by corporations.
In Scotch Whisky Association v. Golden Bottling Ltd. (2006), the Delhi High Court ruled that Scotch Whisky, though a GI of Scotland, had to be protected against dilution in India because authenticity mattered in the global context.
Yet, while foreign interests have found vigorous protection in Indian courts, domestic artisans remain ensnared in red tape.
The paradox deepens when one considers that India has been a vocal champion of GI rights at the WTO, demanding protection for Basmati rice and Darjeeling tea on the global stage, while its own citizens are denied similar justice at home.
The problem, at its heart, is the exclusivity of the GI framework. By hinging eligibility on registration, documentation and collective organisation, it privileges those with resources over those without. This structural bias leaves the poor and marginalised without recourse.
The courts, though occasionally sympathetic, cannot by themselves correct systemic exclusion. Unless the law is reformed to embrace inclusivity, to recognise oral traditions, undocumented practices, and lived realities, it will remain a hollow promise.
To argue that the GI regime needs reform is not to undermine its potential. Properly administered, it could transform local economies, preserve cultural heritage, and empower marginalised communities. But at present, it operates as a system of capture, hijacked by the powerful, often reduced to an exercise in branding. The ethos of GI — that certain products belong not to an individual but to a people, not to a corporation but to a community — is betrayed when the law is applied as a tool of exclusion.
The time has come for a reckoning. India cannot continue to champion GI protections on the international stage while allowing its own artisans to be deprived of their ethnic right at home.
The law must be reimagined, not as a fortress of paperwork, but as a bridge to justice. Until then, the Darjeeling tea plucker, the Banarasi weaver, the Kondapalli toy-maker and the Goan distiller will remain united by a cruel irony: they are the rightful owners of traditions the world admires, yet perpetual outsiders in the very system that claims to protect them.
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| A Goan family working on their Feni farm to produce Cashew Feni (All Rights Reserved) |
The Way Forward
The question, then, is not whether GI certification is useful, it is, but whether it can be made inclusive. Goa must resist the temptation to parade GI-certified bottles as trophies for tourists while silencing the very people who gave Feni its soul.
The state must explore collective cooperatives, subsidised registrations, simplified compliance pathways, and mobile registration units that reach into villages rather than wait for villagers to navigate labyrinthine bureaucracies.
Without such mechanisms, the GI will serve as a marketing gimmick rather than a legal safeguard. It will strip Feni of its cultural diversity, homogenising it for the market while erasing its roots.
What Goa risks losing is more than a spirit. It is the communal identity distilled in every backyard bhatti, the seasonal rituals tied to cashew harvests, the lived authenticity that no label can replicate.
In the end, Feni’s story may come to mirror that of Darjeeling Tea or Banarasi Sarees: prestigious abroad, impoverished at home. A brand elevated, a tradition betrayed. The law, designed as a shield, would have become the very sword that cut down those it was meant to protect.
The irony could not be more bitter. For, while the world toasts to GI-certified Feni, savouring its “authenticity,” the real Feni—the smoky, sharp, unbottled essence of Goa—may already have been legislated out of existence.
The advent of GI-certified Feni on Goa’s shelves, set to coincide with the cashew season of March 2025, was projected as a watershed moment in the drink’s long and chequered journey from the dusty villages of Goa to the polished counters of metropolitan bars.
At least on the surface, the move signals authenticity, recognition and a long-overdue validation of a drink that is as much a part of Goa’s cultural heritage as its music, its temples and its churches.
Yet, beneath the veneer of celebration lies a far more disquieting reality—one that reveals the lopsidedness of a legal regime originally designed to safeguard the interests of the grassroots creator, but which, in practice, has begun to edge him out of the very narrative he built.
The Geographical Indication, in its essence, was never meant to be a corporate trophy or a marketing stamp for a privileged few.
The law was conceptualised and enacted with the declared purpose of protecting traditional knowledge, preserving cultural uniqueness and, most importantly, ensuring that the small farmer, the village artisan, the humble creator—the one who lacks the economic muscle of large corporations—could continue to earn a living from his craft without fear of imitation or misappropriation.
In principle, then, GI registration for Feni ought to have been the triumph of the toddy tapper, the distiller with his traditional bhann and launni, the local who sells a few hundred litres of Feni or Urrak to neighbouring taverns, sustaining himself through a seasonal income that supplements his household.
In practice, however, the law has metamorphosed into a gatekeeping mechanism, accessible and advantageous only to a select few producers who possess the resources, networks and administrative wherewithal to comply with the stringent standards demanded by certification.
For the small-time distiller, grappling already with rising cashew costs, labour shortages and the shrinking availability of forest land for distillation, the bureaucratic maze of GI licensing, branding and conformity is nothing short of insurmountable.
Instead of levelling the playing field, the GI label seems to have fenced it off, turning an inclusive heritage into an exclusive commodity.
The irony could not be starker.
The excise department, in its zeal to strictly adhere to the letter of the GI law, has lost sight of its spirit.
By handing over the authority to use the tag, logo and GI-certified nomenclature to a handful of producers, it is effectively endorsing a regime where tourists will be sold only ‘authentic’ Feni—bottled, labelled and branded to perfection—while the original village-based industry that has kept the drink alive for centuries is pushed into invisibility, branded inferior by omission rather than fact.
The Feni that is shared across homes, poured into small glasses at local taverns and enjoyed by Goans in the intimate spaces of their communities, stands to be delegitimised.
It is this inversion of intent that strikes at the very heart of the GI regime in Goa. What was meant to be a law protecting the marginalised has turned into a weapon of exclusion against them.
The pitfall lies not only in the rigidity of implementation but in the blindness of policymakers to the socio-economic ecosystem in which Feni thrives.
Feni is not merely a commercial product; it is a cultural artefact, a living tradition, one whose authenticity lies not in the stamp of a logo but in the process, the locality and the community that sustains it.
By insisting on certification as the arbiter of authenticity, the State is in danger of divorcing Feni from its roots and transforming it into a product that exists solely for the tourist’s gaze.
The local drinker, who has never cared for tags but has always trusted his neighbour’s distilling pot, will now be told that what he consumes is not ‘authentic.’
The small distiller, who has never sought markets beyond his village, will now be criminalised or marginalised for doing what his ancestors did for generations.
And in this shift, Goa risks losing more than it gains: the living connection between heritage and livelihood.
The law, in its present form, has tilted the scales towards marketability at the expense of equity. It has privileged the well-resourced few while rendering invisible the small many.
Unless the excise department rethinks its role not as an enforcer of narrow legality but as a custodian of cultural justice, the march of GI-certified Feni will not be a celebration but a slow betrayal.
In chasing the sheen of international recognition, Goa may well forfeit the very soul of the drink it sought to protect.
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