Originally published 2019-02-02.
Versova Beach in Mumbai was once buried under so much rubbish that its sand was barely visible. Starting in October 2015, a lawyer named Afroz Shah began clearing it by hand every weekend, first with an elderly neighbour and then with thousands of volunteers. By April 2018 the effort had removed more than 13 million kilograms of waste, and in March that year olive ridley sea turtle hatchlings were seen crawling from the beach to the Arabian Sea, reportedly the first hatching there in about two decades.
The UN Environment Programme named Shah a Champion of the Earth in 2016 and his project has been widely described as the world's largest beach cleanup. This is the story of how it started, what the volunteers actually did, why the turtles matter, and what the project teaches anyone who wants to clean up their own patch of coast.
How the Versova cleanup began
Shah is a Mumbai native. When he returned to Versova and an apartment near the beach in 2015, he found it covered in decaying plastic, clothing, sandals and household waste, in places reportedly about five feet deep. Much of it was washing in from the sea and from the creek and drains that empty onto the shore.
In October 2015 he and his 84-year-old neighbour, Harbansh Mathur, simply went down to the sand and started picking it up. Shah paid for early waste removal out of his own pocket, by some accounts spending close to a quarter of his income on it. Mathur has since died, but the weekend routine the two of them started has continued.
Shah describes each weekend session as a date with the ocean
. The volunteers, known as Versova Resident Volunteers, gathered at his home in orange T-shirts and walked down to the beach together.
Shah working in the mangroves near Versova. As the beach became cleaner, the volunteers extended their work to the mangrove forests and creek banks where rubbish collects before it reaches the sea.
What the beach looked like
Versova before the cleanup gathered pace: a carpet of plastic and debris stretching from the waterline to the buildings. Shah has said plastic was the largest single part of the rubbish, along with clothes and rubber sandals.
The scale is hard to grasp from photos alone. The beach is about 2.5 kilometres long, and it sits beside crowded neighbourhoods where waste services were thin. Al Jazeera reported that nearby slums had just 52 toilet seats for more than 25,000 people, so the problem was never only litter. It was also sanitation, drainage and a city that produces far more waste than it collects.
Shah's answer was to work on both ends. Volunteers cleared the sand, and he spent time with residents of the fishing villages and informal settlements along the shore and creeks, talking about waste, helping to clean shared toilets and encouraging people not to dump rubbish where it would wash out to sea. As he put it to Al Jazeera, the government is not littering; we are.
Volunteers, tractors and setbacks
Volunteers dig plastic out of the sand at Versova. Over the years participants have included local residents, students, schoolchildren, Bollywood actors and politicians.
Collected waste is carried to a tractor-trailer. Al Jazeera reported that three tractors, each loading about 4,000 kilograms, worked on the beach, along with a rented excavator.
What began with two men grew into a weekend fixture with dozens of regular volunteers and, on big days, hundreds more. Reports from the time describe large numbers of schoolchildren taking part on a rota. Machinery joined the hand work once the quantity became too much to bag.
It was not smooth. Municipal trucks often failed to take away what the volunteers collected, and Shah told Al Jazeera that the city's municipal corporation was "not interested" in the project. In late 2017, after weeks of heckling from local men and frustration with the authorities, he briefly suspended the cleanup. Maharashtra's chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, asked him to return, and the weekend sessions resumed.
Totals vary depending on when and by whom they were counted. The UNEP profile from Shah's award cites more than 4,000 tonnes in the early period, and Al Jazeera put the figure at more than 13 million kilograms by April 2018. Either way, it is a staggering amount of rubbish moved by mostly unpaid hands.
The olive ridley turtles return
An olive ridley hatchling, small enough to sit in a palm. Newly hatched olive ridleys weigh only about 12 to 23 grams.
A hatchling heads across the sand toward the water. Hatchlings orient toward the brightest horizon, which is why beach lighting and clutter can lead them astray.
On 22 March 2018, people at Versova saw something nobody there could remember: close to 100 olive ridley hatchlings emerging from the sand and making for the sea over about half an hour. Shah later said he was in tears as soon as I saw those turtles.
Volunteers reportedly kept watch over the nesting area to protect the little turtles from dogs and birds,.
A single hatching does not prove a beach has fully recovered, and nests may have been laid there before without being noticed. Still, turtles need open, uncluttered sand above the high-tide line to dig a nest, and a beach smothered in plastic offers none. The return of nesting at Versova was a powerful sign that the habitat had become usable again.
Hatchlings scramble through the shallows as volunteers watch from a careful distance. Letting turtles make their own way to the sea helps them imprint on their home beach.
Why olive ridleys matter
Sea turtles resting on a white-sand beach in clear water. This picture does not appear to show Versova and is included as a general illustration of turtles hauling out to nest.
The olive ridley is the smallest and most numerous of the sea turtles, with adults reaching about 60 centimetres in shell length. It is still listed as Vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the global nesting population fell by roughly 30 percent within a single generation. The species is famous for the arribada, a mass nesting in which thousands of females come ashore together. India hosts one of the largest of these at Gahirmatha in Odisha, on the opposite coast from Mumbai.
Eggs incubate for around 45 to 70 days, and the temperature of the sand decides the hatchlings' sex: warm nests produce females, cooler ones males. Their main threats are egg collection, accidental capture in fishing nets, coastal development, artificial lights and marine debris, which is exactly why a cleaner, quieter beach on India's west coast is welcome news for them.
Lessons for anyone starting a cleanup
- Start small and keep going. Versova began with two people. Consistency, the same time every weekend, is what turned it into a movement.
- Plan where the waste goes. Collecting rubbish is only half the job. Arrange collection with your local council or a recycler before you start.
- Work upstream. Much beach litter arrives from rivers, drains and creeks. Shah's later work on mangroves, creeks and the Mithi River came from that insight.
- Bring the neighbours in. Talking with the people who live closest to the problem built trust and changed habits more than clean-up photos ever could.
- Record what you find. Notes and photos of what keeps returning point to the sources that need fixing.
Shah went on to be named one of CNN's Heroes in 2019, and the UN's Clean Seas campaign has cited his work as an inspiration. The video below shows the volunteers and the beach as the turtles began to return.
Versova is not a fairy tale with a tidy ending. Rubbish still washes in, and the city's waste problem is far from solved. But the beach shows what persistent ordinary effort can do, and a hundred tiny turtles heading for the Arabian Sea are a fitting thank-you to the people who made room for them.
Sources: UN Environment Programme: Afroz Shah, Champions of the Earth 2016; Al Jazeera, April 2018: Filthy Mumbai beach rebreeds turtles, thanks to a city lawyer; Wikipedia: Afroz Shah; Wikipedia: Olive ridley sea turtle. Photos: Afroz Shah and Versova Resident Volunteers, via social media and news agencies.
COMMENTS