Team Herald
PANJIM: The hospitality industry in the State was slammed by Goa State Waste Management Corporation Managing Director Sanjit Rodrigues who accused them of being responsible for the garbage problem afflicting the state.
Rodrigues, speaking at a national workshop organised by Ecotourism Society of India (ESOI) on ‘Sustainable & Responsible Tourism’ with a special focus on ‘Sustainable Tourism Criteria for India’ (STCI), urged the industry to show some sensitivity to the problem and help in separating the garbage as otherwise the situation would not change.
He claimed that not one hotel in the South segregated garbage and in Panjim only one did. Rodrigues said hotels should perhaps charge tourists for the garbage they generated because Goa could not be the garbage men for everyone.
Rodrigues said the population of Goa was just 14-odd lakh but it attracted 6-odd lakh tourists so the question needed to be asked as to ‘Whose waste were they cleaning up?’ Rodrigues said, “The industry is generating this waste and you cannot shy away by giving lip service to the problem. You take any station in Goa, any place it is dirty with plastic waste. You make it worse by being silent, indifferent and nothing seems to affect you.”
Goa, he said, had moved on from malaria to chikungunya and people die and no one seemed to question why it was happening. According to him, Panjim was segregating waste because of a campaign that started ten years ago when they went to schools and talked to young students there. Now those students were young men and women who were sold on the idea and were ensuring their parents did this. He urged the senior hospitality professionals to prove him wrong.
