News has begun to trickle in that tar balls have surfaced on the beaches of Goa yet again. This has come to be an annual phenomenon in the pre-monsoon period, when the churning of the currents off the west coast of India bring with the waves the sticky and oily substance that is deposited on the sands, dirtying the beaches. The tar balls are by now a common sight on Goa’s beaches at the end of the summer season that is also the high season for domestic tourism and the fear is that the sight of the tar balls could turn the visitors away.
The tar balls menace has been occurring for roughly five decades, with the first sighting recorded in the 1970s, but there has been little done to contain the phenomenon. It is with the problem having grown in magnitude in the past years and creating negative issues for tourism that it has become a matter of major concern. However, the State alone will not be able to tackle the tar ball phenomenon, it will require the intervention of the Central government as well as that of the international community, as mainly these tar balls are formed due to a reaction of oil spills or from oily ballast dumped by sea-going vessels that on reacting with saline water turn gooey. It is the origin that has to be tackled and it can’t be done singly by Goa.
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The fact is that the occurrence of tar balls is not reducing. Last year the tar balls had arrived early, in mid-April, and had prompted the government to seek a solution from the Union Ministry for Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC). In the previous year the State had already written to the Ministry but had received no response. Unless the Centre acknowledges the problem and then makes efforts at a global level to resolve it, the tar balls will not stop washing ashore on the beaches of Goa. Pertinently, it is not just the Goa beaches that have tar balls deposits, but this happens in various shores across the world.
The concerns raised till now are of the tar balls affecting the tourism business, but studies have concluded that this substance could pose a potential environment hazard and also impact humans due to some hazardous pathogens nurturing on them. A preliminary study by National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) in earlier years had found that the pathogens could affect the people. The toxic content could also prove lethal to marine fauna and fish, especially to bivalves and shrimps, which form a major source of food for bottom-feeding fish. This is another concern, which makes it imperative to find a solution for the problem.
Goa has on paper a protocol to dealing with the tar balls once they are seen on the beaches. It requires a solution to contain the arrival of the tar balls and for this the Centre has to play its part. Just because it is a recurring issue should not result in lethargy. The efforts to put an end to the menace have to be made all year round and not just every summer when the tar balls actually appear. What could help make a case for finding a solution at an early date is if Goa can quantify the damage to the ecology caused by the tar balls. This could hasten the process to find a way out of this annual occurrence.
