I wondered why India’s first overtly zombie film, Go Goa Gone, was based in Goa.

Perhaps, (and this is pure speculation), because zombies can only exist in lands where the dead body is preserved after death, interned in tombs and burial grounds, as in a land with a very high Christian or Muslim population. Goa fits the bill with its high Catholic population (mercifully, no one protested). If you burn the body after death, then there is no corpse that can go around wandering the streets troubling the living. There can be no zombie.