The Wellawatte beach

By Michael Hardy

Garbage. It’s such a common sight on Colombo’s beaches that after a while you begin to consider it as natural as the seaweed and coconuts. Plastic bags, liquor bottles, pieces of styrofoam, old sandals, candy wrappers…every imaginable kind of trash can be found on the otherwise-beautiful shores of Mount Lavinia, Dehiwala, Wellawatte, or Bambalapitiya. And there the trash stays, for days, weeks, even months before someone decides to dispose of it properly.

Sri Lanka is famous for its beaches. Tourists travel from around the world to relax at our pristine beach resorts. Yet the Municipal Council of Colombo doesn’t seem to care that its residents must wade through garbage — not to mention having to cross the railway tracks — to enjoy the beauty at their front door. Due to the small number of public spaces in the city, the beach front constitutes one of the few places where people can relax after work or on the weekend, which is just one more reason why the government should keep it as clean as possible.

It wouldn’t be difficult. The government could partner with beachfront homes and businesses to pick up garbage, or hire a few of the beggars who roam the beaches to pitch in. This would provide money and employment for the homeless while keeping the beach clean for everybody else. Tilome Nanayakkara, General Manager of the Global Towers Hotel in Wellawatte, said she had offered the hotel’s help to clean the nearby beaches and the Wellawatte Railway Station. The government refused.

This is the same government that promised to rebuild beach front houses after the 2004 tsunami and still hasn’t done anything. A woman living in a beach front shanty in Bambalapitiya said that she had lived in the same spot for 25 years. The tsunami destroyed part of her house, and the government still hasn’t kept its promise to replace it. Meanwhile, the government collects garbage from Marine Drive but refuses to cross the railway tracks to collect her own garbage. When the government fails to perform one of its most basic duties — garbage collection — is it any surprise that people resort to leaving garbage on the beaches?

The woman said that most of the garbage came from the Havelock Canal, which runs through Wellawatte and flows into the ocean. “The big houses along the canal dump their garbage in the water,” she said. “I think the government should block the canal and find another way for the water to go into the ocean,” she said.

Despite the garbage, the beaches are popular places in Colombo. But that doesn’t mean beachgoers aren’t upset by the pollution. One Muslim family had traveled from Kandy to enjoy the Wellawatte beach last week. They used to live in Colombo, and have been coming to the beach for decades. During Ramazan they would often arrive at the beach at one in the morning and stay until three.

“The beach was much nicer then,” a woman named Alina said. “The beach started getting worse two or three years ago. Now people just leave their garbage here.”

The government must make a decision: Are tourists the only people in Sri Lanka who deserve clean, well-maintained beaches? Are public beaches important enough to take care of? Or will beaches be privatised like so many of Sri Lanka’s natural resources? Are beaches for the people or for the powerful? These are the questions that the government must answer.