The amount of newsprint spent on writing about the absolute breakdown of any machinery to tackle Goa’s garbage, should have virtually added to the load, but no amount of public pressure and adverse media, seems to be moving the government collectively and the tourism department in particular, in treating this as a state calamity and handling this as it would handle a major disaster.
Imagine this. In the month of December and barely nine days before Christmas and then the New Year ahead, when the world comes to Goa, we do not have an agency to clean garbage on Goa’s beaches. The beach cleaning contract has been terminated (and there are no complaints with this decision), but how could the tourism department which controls Goa’s beaches, terminate one contract without an alternative in place. It is very clear that the tourism department has to decide for itself or the government needs to take a decision and ask the department to implement one of this:
a) Appoint another beach cleaning agency by issuing a transparent contract which is far more cost effective. In fact this should have been done by now.
b) Ask the panchayats in the coastal belts to handle this and that same time the panchayats must get the necessary funds, not just to carry out beach cleaning but also garbage treatment in coastal areas where there is no garbage treatment plant.
c) Form a waste management corporation with sweeping statutory powers to execute the task of picking up garbage and treating it. This has to be a piece of landmark game changing legislation.
The bottom line here is that the Tourism department is not equipped to handle the garbage mess. It is indeed in a Catch 22 situation. It wants more footfalls and its job is to get more tourists in. But it is woefully short of will and ideas, to do the painstaking, thankless job of cleaning up.
The biggest sufferers are tourists and the shack owners. The latter, because the presence of such large amounts of litter on beaches, is actually pulling tourists away from Calangute and Baga. For the tourist too, the experience is painful. With clean toilets, showers and dedicated pathways to the beach only a myth, the presence of garbage piling up is a sure shot way of driving away tourists from Goa. And that process has started.
Waste management like a lot else has been a victim of all talk and no action, in most places across Goa. While the Saligao Treatment plant is showcased as the Goa governments riposte to its critics, who maintained that the government has not been functioning, garbage strewn on the beaches and villages have to be collected and segregate before being sent to the different plants.
Critically accountability has to be handed over and fixed by bringing about drastic and yet simple changes. And the Assembly must meet to debate and take the way forward. This is a direction that is needed to come from elected representatives, in the House. If more time was spent in such legislations than moving a bill making Marathi as the second language, the misson of beach cleaning would have been a solemn legal duty, failing which punitive punishments would be in store.
