A State that prides itself for its undulating verdant hills and enticing azure beaches has a dark side that it just cannot seem to rein in. Garbage.
Dotting every town, village and even the remotest of Goa’s geographical gems are trails, or rather heaps, of discarded plastic bags, bottles, empty snack wrappers, glasses and what have you. While this speaks volumes for the utter lack of civic sense among most people - local residents and tourists alike – it also holds a mirror to the government’s reluctance or inability to provide adequate garbage disposal facilities - such as bins at regular distances all across the State - which leads to most people littering wherever they wish.
Goa is India’s smallest State and could have thus easily stood out as a shining example of effective waste management if the powers-that-be would deal with the issue more seriously. Of course, the State has a couple of good waste treatment facilities, but what it has failed to tackle is littering itself.
Earlier this year, the government ambitiously introduced a revised Solid Waste Management Policy under the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016. The intention was to improve infrastructure for waste management and to support local bodies towards this end.
Village panchayats and municipalities were also deemed to have been given more teeth by way of being empowered, under the policy, to impose spot fines on litterbugs or on those found to be burning garbage out in the open. The policy even went a step further and envisaged the deployment of marshals who would be given devices to monitor and fine violators on the spot by way of issuing digital challans and maintaining photo evidence of the littering in question.
Unfortunately, as it has been with most of the government’s well-meaning intiatives, this too doesn’t seem to have taken off at all as littering continues with gay abandon.
Single-use plastics have been the most menacing type of litter in the State. With online shopping for anything from appliances and clothes to groceries and food becoming the order of the day, single-use plastic waste has increased exponentially. Also, the lack of will of the average shopper to carry their own reusable bags to the market has led to plastic bags being handed out by vendors left, right and centre. This only contributes to the Everest of waste that the State’s hapless management facilities are left to deal with.
The utter callousness towards waste segregation is yet another sore point. Despite the government’s best efforts, wet and dry waste are habitually disposed of together at source in many areas across the State. This not only makes waste processing more tedious than it already is, but also takes a toll on the people working at such facilities as they are required to manually segregate a pack of used plastic bottles from say a pack of decomposing biryani. It is quite a thankless job as it is, but the nonchalance of waste generators towards segregation at source only makes it worse.
Catch ‘em young is the slogan that perhaps resonates the most when it comes to effectively dealing with littering and the consequent problems it piles on. If citizens are, from a young age, sensitised to how responsible disposal of waste and dedicated segregation at source can alleviate not only the plight of the environment but also of the workers at our waste management facilities, it would definitely make a world of difference.
It would also be in the government’s best interest to bare all the teeth of the legislations it has enforced and show no mercy against litterbugs if it is in fact keen on promoting Goa as a clean and green State.