Rising at dawn on Sunday morning, students, bankers, doctors and many
more, got together at three different spots in Chennai. But they were
not together to launch a rally, to give a public demonstration or make
any proclamations. They were together for just one mission, removing
garbage off Chennai’s beaches.
The beach cleaning was organised as
part of the Joy of Giving Week. Led by an NGO, Bhumi, the event saw
over a thousand people from every walk of life, from the employees of
the Barclays Bank, to students of Chennai’s Corporation schools, to
volunteers from the Chennai Trekking Club and other civic organisations
in the city.
The cleaning up happened at the Light House,
Santhome, Broken Bridge near Elliot’s Beach and Foreshore Estate. After
hours of putting their backs into dirt and garbage, the volunteers
managed to collect a total of 4.65 tonnes of waste.
“People should
stop throwing plastic everywhere. It kills the plants and destroys our
earth,” says B Vinoth Kumar, an eighth grade student of Chennai Middle
School, M G R Nagar, who prides himself for having collected 6 bags of
garbage at the beach cleaning.
But it was not only garbage that
the beach cleaners came across. While the cleaning was in operation at
the Broken Bridge, the volunteers came upon nothing less than a dead
body. The police was immediately summoned to take the body away but the
incident left some of them shaken.
An online petition was also
launched at the event to urge the corporation to clean the beaches of
Chennai. “The corporation only looks at cleaning Marina Beach and
Elliots beach. The rest of the beaches are ignored. Unless the
corporation takes up the initiative to clean all the beaches, this will
not be sustainable, as volunteer beach cleaning happens just once in
months,” said Co-founder of Bhumi, Dr K K Prahaladan.
A part of
the waste that was collected was also segregated into plastic and
biodegradable waste. The plastic waste that littered the beaches was
then sent to make some tough roads in the village of Medambakkam in the
Kacheepuram district. “The village had asked us for the plastic. So
after segregation it was sent to the village for use to lay the roads,”
he said.
