Varca’s migrants, dwindling fishermen are reasons white sands are abandoned

At the 5.30 pm sunset, the sun beams over the beautiful white sands of Varca beach with its massive pine trees and small thickets running along the grains of sand. But the beach beautiful is kind of abandoned and has very few people on it. Listening to the plight of the locals leaves this reporter shocked at how a beach of the local villagers is now snubbed upon.

“There’s a little of the water sports business that operates from Varca beach and a few shacks while a lot of boats go out from this beach or even trawler owners who function from Betul usually store their floats on the beach and all the work force of these various people are men from UP and Bihar who often stare obscenely at women which makes uncomfortable to come here in the evenings. Even the small children’s play-area at the beach parking is not left unattended by these migrants and they stare at mothers with their infants and hence local young women avoid the beach,” explains Tara Fernandes who lives in Varca and prefers to ride to Trinity Beach in Benaulim for her evening walks.

While Agostinho Dias in his 60’s struggles with a bag of empty beer cans along the beach and we stop to have a chat with him under the roots of an over 100-year-old pine tree, he reminisces how he spent his entire life on this beach casting nets, selling fish and going on small canoes as a ramponnkar.

“Till date I come by 2 am to the beach and a few of us cast our nets from the shore itself and have a small catch by 4 am and then we sell what we can on the beach or at the market in Margao and we head back home. But there’s very little fish coming our way. There are fibre boats with fine mesh illegal nets and massive trawlers that are draining the sea and we’re struggling to make ends meet,” explains Agostinho.

Agostinho says that his occupation is difficult and that his sons chose to buy taxis and become taxi drivers to service the tourists at the hotels along the coast while most boys now work overseas on the ship or with a Portuguese passport in London. “There are few to come and care for the sea and for the Varca beach which once belonged to locals but now to migrants and anti-socials.”

“There are some panchayat and Tourism Department appointed men who clean the beach now and then but these metallic cans and bottles cut our feet at dawn in the dark, hence I clean the beach whenever I can, only because I really love this beach of my childhood,” explains Agostinho.

Similarly we meet local girl Gretel Coutinho who tells us how a foreigner provides a local dog feed and she comes to feed the stray dogs on the beach since they are devoid of any food with no locals or good shacks on the beach and they often bite people in hunger and frustration which makes the beach an even more scary location keeping people away. Recently a foreign tourist, while jogging on the beach in the morning, was chased by hungry stray dogs and badly bitten.

With one dilapidated culvert being the only entry point to the beach and most of the beach in darkness, locals tell us how anti-social tourists drink openly on the beach parking space with no cops patrolling the area and often these elements stone the street lighting on the beach entrance in drunkenness and often assault locals who question them. The beach also has a dilapidated shack of palm thatched roof which is incidentally the only shelter for the life guards at the beach who have just posted a red flag as a no swimming zone but no real guard on the coast to stop people venturing into the sea.

Besides a broken and roofless Goa Tourism counter to monitor water sports on the beach lies shut and the Varca beach has no room for toilets or a tap for water. The villagers are fed up of their white sands being ruined.