Rabia Tewari and Indranil Sengupta moved closer to the Mahim beach in Mumbai last year with the sole purpose of enjoying the view and go for morning walks, but their window opened to the filth that washed up on the shore. After multiple calls to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation led to the usual lackadaisical approach from the civic body, the couple started spending their weekends cleaning the beach.
Over 36 weeks (9 months), they cleared 500 tonnes of waste as they cleaned a part of the beach between 8 a.m and 10 a.m every Saturday. What they usually find is tonnes and tonnes of plastic buried deep in the sand. The amount of plastic garbage they unearthed shocked them so much that they decided to never use plastic again. “Beach-cleaning also made us realise how much plastic we use in our everyday lives, we don’t really think seriously about what happens to it when we throw it away. Where does it go? How does it affect our environment? So it also made us seriously want to reduce our dependency on plastic,” said Tewari, who is the business head of her husband’s company.
They hoped their neighbours would follow their lead and join in the cleanup, but they realised soon enough that not many were interested in investing the time and energy required for it. “We’re trying to get more locals from Mahim to participate but that has been a challenge. They have literally written this lovely beach off and we’re trying to figure out how to get them to participate,” said Sengupta, who runs a design firm in Mumbai. The couple didn’t let this setback dishearten them and continued to devote their time.
However, it’s an insurmountable task for two people to clean an entire beach so they tried to convince more people to join their initiative. Sengupta says, “A few people from the nearby Koli village came forward to help. We usually see a lot of kids or the elderly being more enthusiastic about helping out. While we’re extremely glad to find help from anyone, we would really find it helpful if people of our generation who could pitch in a lot more.”
