There is an Afroz in each of us...

When in March 2015, Afroz Shah, a lawyer by profession, shifted to his new apartment near the Mumbai’s Versova beach, he was pained at the sight from his balcony. The beach, where used to play as a child, was now covered in five feet deep plastic waste.

He could have written to the authorities about it, but he knew that if they had not done anything to clean it in so many years, there was no reason why they would do it now. So, he decided to do what was in his control:

To start cleaning the 2.9km beach all by himself!

After agonizing over the daily view of the beach for six months, on one weekend in October 2015, he went to beach with a few bags, picked up some plastic waste and put them in bins for BMC to take away.

He continued doing for the next three months. Every weekend, he would go the beach and clean a tiny portion of the plastics. He would call up all those he knew and invite them to join, though none did. He would also invite the neighbours in his apartment building to join him – and they would give him strange looks…

…till, one day, an old 84-yr old neighbour promised that he will join him, and he did.

The sight of a man in his 30s and an octogenarian combing the beach for plastics must have attracted attention and curiosity. Though the old gentleman Mr Mathur, who was a terminal cancer patient, passed away 3 months later, some volunteers started joining Afroz’s quest.

In a year or so, from those lonesome-twosome, there were 200 regular volunteers who would come every weekend to participate in what United Nations described as the World’s Largest Beach Clean-up Drive.

Soon the local counselor and MLA noticed what was happening on the beach, and extended support. Other citizens started joining in in the effort. Many schools started sending their students to join in, and some other groups started coming up in the other 29 beaches which Mumbai has.

Much of such plastic debris is buried 30-40ft below in the sand, which cannot be manually excavated. Earlier they used to contribute and hire excavators to clean that – till the 1^st excavator was gifted to, what had become Afroz Shah Foundation by then, by Amitabh Bachchan… and BMC followed with the help.

This collective initiative won awards and recognitions from UN, CNN, GOI etc, as it expanded its efforts into educating community about waste management, waste reduction, recycling and circular economy.

Over the last 8years or so, what started with the one man’s crazy idea to clean a large beach all by himself, has managed to clean 85mn kg + of plastic debris from the Mumbai beaches.

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Will Afroz and the volunteers succeed in cleaning all the beaches?
One doesn’t know… maybe or maybe not

(In a 1967 Dustin Hoffman movie, The Graduate, Mr McGuire had advised the young Ben, a confused Harvard graduate, “Plastics! There is a great future in plastics. Think about it!”
What, at that time, was seen as a solution to world’s problem has become a problem itself half a century later…)

BUT still, it is worth a try, rather than not trying at all…
because after all
… there is an Afroz in each of us!