Amitabh Bachchan may have been a popular mascot for the national pulse polio campaign, but the Goa Law Commission has now used the superstar as a celebrity footnote to promote its crucial draft agricultural land reform legislation. Speaking to mediapersons here, Commission Chairman Ramakanth Khalap recommended that the State Government should ban sale of agricultural land to non-agriculturists, to protect the diminishing agricultural lands in the State, which are being eyes by real estate speculators. He gave Bachchan’s example to drive home the message, citing the actor’s controversial land deal controversy. “We must stop sale of agriculturists land to non-agriculturists. In absence of such a law in Goa, agricultural lands especially orchard lands are being purchased by rich Goans who keep such land fallow and unproductive for obvious speculative reasons,” Khalap said. “Remember the Amitabh Bachchan case. Even he was pulled up,” Khalap said, citing the Amitabh example twice during his Press conference here. Bachchan, after a protracted legal tangle some years back, was forced to forfeit his claim to agricultural land in the Daulatpur village in Uttar Pradesh’s Barabanki district, after a petitioner challenged the actor’s claim, by arguing that he was not an agriculturist. Land norms in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and several other States, ban the sale of agricultural land by non-agriculturists as a means of promoting agriculture, as well as to safeguard land meant for crop production. Khalap said that in Goa - a geographically small State where the real estate market was booming and where fertile land was being rampantly converted for real estate development purposes — such legislation was of paramount importance. “The rate at which land is being sold, Goans may not have any land for themselves. People from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and other metro areas, have just been buying large tracts of land for speculative purposes. This must stop at some point,” Khalap said. “This problem is extremely severe and Goa must address it,” Khalap said, adding that a draft legislation prepared by the Goa Law Commission, for preventing sale of agricultural land to non-agriculturists would be handed over to the Goa Government soon.