Goa’s undulating coastline has long been projected as picturesque and alluring on travel blogs and magazine covers. But reality hits – or rather pierces – hard as soon as one sets foot on these beaches. Buried beneath the golden sand are several shards of broken alcohol bottles…remnants of the ‘good times’ visitors have had in the sunshine state, that go on to give subsequent visitors a rather agonising welcome once they are wedged deep into the soles of the feet.
Drinking on beaches continues to be a sore point for a State that is so desperately trying to ramp up its appeal on the global tourism map in a bid to attract high-end holidaymakers. In fact, the State government began addressing the menace in early 2019, when it decided to ban public drinking by slapping a Rs 2,000 fine on any individual found drinking on beaches and Rs 10,000 on a group of people found to be indulging in such behaviour. A few years later, in 2022, it also decided to ‘heavily penalise’ anyone found to be littering beaches and breaking bottles.
Despite the government’s best intentions, however, implementation of the rules has gone from being sluggish to virtually non-existent. The inability of the law enforcers to rein in violators is most apparent on beaches that see exponential tourist footfalls, such as the North Goa coastal tourism circuit of Candolim, Calangute and Baga. When droves of tourists descend onto these beaches, it is virtually impossible to keep an eye on every single one of them. And so, while the law enforcers train their radars on one or two groups of visitors, other such groups gingerly whip out their spread of alcohol and make merry in plain sight.
The beaches are not spared even during the monsoon, when people are advised to stay off the coast due to rough seas and inclement weather. A slight let-up in rainfall, and most are quick to make a beeline for the beaches to ‘chill’ once again. It is only when high tides and strong currents erode the shoreline that one can see the thousands of broken glass bottles that lie beneath, exposing the dangers to the lives of young and old alike, and underscoring the utter lack of civic sense and social responsibility on the part of the wrongdoers.
Recently, the Tourism Minister told the legislative assembly that his department had collected over Rs 4 lakh in fines from at least 200 tourists who were caught drinking on beaches last year. Ideally, this amount should be directed towards increasing surveillance against drinking along the State’s coast, but it is unclear how this money is being used.
The former minister of tourism had announced somewhere in 2019 that Goa’s beaches would have specially marked ‘drinking zones’ within which people would be free to consume alcohol. He had also said that anyone found drinking outside of such zones would have to cough up Rs 5,000 in fines. This too, does not seem to have seen the light of day.
The new tourism season is around the corner and the government has just about two months in hand if it wants to get its act together in devising a mechanism to regulate or, better still, prevent drinking on beaches. If a dearth of manpower is the problem, the State could always turn to artificial intelligence (AI), which is already being used extensively in several nations across the world to thwart crimes and violations.
Of course, the State government must also have the will to not only introduce such a system but to also maintain it. Otherwise, like most of its other previous noteworthy initiatives, all it will be is a flash in the pan.