Hundreds of residents of Mumbai along with few celebrities and UN officials have pulled off a task of cleaning up a litter-infested 2.5 km stretch on Versova beach of Mumbai.
Hyped as the biggest beach cleanup in the history, the concern to clean up this beach was first floated by lawyer Afroz Shah. The diligent resident of Versova in Mumbai started to clean up the beach on his own last year.
Slowly and steadily civic authorities along with volunteers started to join in to clean the mess. Forty-three weeks later, around 284,000 kgs of trash was deported from the stretch of beach.
Volunteers showed no reluctance as individuals from different sections of society stepped in, including fishermen, mothers, students and celebrities like Pooja Bhatt, Subhash Ghai and Deepak Dobriyal.
The UN official who joined the drive was Eric Solheim. He is the chief of United Nation Environment Programme (UNEP) and Lewis Pugh, the UN Patron of the Oceans.
Biggest beach clean up in history shows us no challenge is insurmountable- @LewisPugh @UNEP https://t.co/T7646sujzB pic.twitter.com/rxsXy104yI
— UN GA President (@UN_PGA) August 10, 2016
All this you see above is the years of dumping of garbage on the Versova beach. But the image below shows how clean the beach looks now.
The clean-up drive also caught attention of international media.
Image Credit: Facebook.com/LewisPhug
