Karwar’s beach cleaning drive collects 8 tonnes of garbage

Driving through the western coast from Goa to Karnataka provides a stark contrast between the two states on how they maintain their beaches. While it is always party time on the clean beaches of Goa, just 15 kilometers down in Karwar, it is a picture of disgust, what with tonnes of garbage, human excreta, plastic and several other pollutants dotting its beaches.

But thanks to a group of concerned citizens and organisations, who cleared the picturesque beach on Saturday, it has a decent appearance now. They gathered a whopping eight tonnes of garbage from the 4.5-km-long running beach at Kodibagh.

“It was not an ordinary beach-combing operation, but was a drive to keep clean a celebrated part of Karwar. The beach is named after the nation’s pride and Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. We, as the people of Karwar, have a social obligation to keep the beach clean as a respect to that great soul,” said Anand Asnotikar, minister for fisheries and a native of Karwar.

Asnotikar, along with the civic chief Ganapathy Ulvekar, deputy commissioner Iklango Zamir and more than 600 students, officials of Navy, coast guard and the police, participated in the drive to clean the beach.

The volume of trash strewn on the beach surprised the beach combers. “It is not the palke (organic material brought in by the surf) but a whole lot of inorganic material like plastic, thermocol, pet bottles, glass bottles and few other materials that are just not meant to be on the beach,” said Arvind Kasbekar, a local student.
Excreta on beach

The beach combers did not touch the part near the fishermen’s town of Mazali, which also is a part of the Tagore beach but is dotted with human excreta. Sources in the Karwar Town Municipal council told DNA that many villages of fishermen situated alongside the beach do not come under the ‘nirmala grama yojana’ (clean village drive) of the government. Many hundreds of houses still do not have their own toilets, so the people use the beach to empty their bowels.

“Every year, we take up a drive once or twice, educating the people against open defecation, but many of them have a genuine problem of not having their own toilets. So we have to bear this nuisance till toilets are constructed,” said Udaykumar Shetty, commissioner of the Municipality. There are plans to put up mobile toilets closer to beach to help those who do not have toilets at their houses, Shetty told DNA.