Mumbaikars, college students conduct mega clean-up at Juhu Beach

Today marked a new refreshed start for the city's

Beach Warriors

– they got back into work mode to clean the

Juhu Koliwada

beach in a large gathering, after a long gap of many months since the COVID-19

pandemic

started. This marked the 158th week of beach clean-up and was done in collaboration with the

Juhu Versova Andheri Association

(JVA) and the Bandra Khar Santacruz (BKS) team. Says

Chinu Kwatra

who spearheaded the effort, “This was the first such event of 2021 with close to 500 people taking part. Last year, we were sporadically cleaning the beaches in small numbers of 10-12 people. The idea was that since the focus in

health

and

wellness

is such a big part of 2021 making a start by cleaning the beach is apt. In the new normal, with more people going outdoors and visiting spots like the beaches, it becomes imperative to once again put our beaches in focus and take care of them.”

Picking up 4,000 kgs of trash from the sands

Volunteers, including students, worked hard to clean the beach of trash and plastic waste

The event started at 8 am and went on till 10.30 am. Several colleges - Chetana College, UPG College, LS Raheja College, Patkar College, Leela College, SIES college, ML Dahanukar College of Commerce and K J Somaiya College of Engineering participated with Rotaract Thane Downtown. Informs Chinu, “We cleaned 4,000 kgs of trash in all, of which 99 per cent of it was plastic. It also had paper and school bags, gunny bags. cloth and other discarded items.”

Adds Nidhi Chaturvedi of JVA and BKS organisations who was also present this morning, "This was the first clean-up of the year. As citizens, we need to be more conscious of cleaning our oceans and beaches. If people pick up even a little bit of trash, they would know much effort it takes to do so. Let's learn to be responsible and do our bit and not blame the BMC for everything. We are forward to more such events, perhaps even every weekend."