the goan I network
PANAJI
Akin to the bravado of the unlikely declaration that Goa is Open Defecation-Free, Goa’s assertion that single-use plastic is being banned from Wednesday is hard to swallow and apparently an uphill task for the administration to enforce.
The Goa non-Biodegradable Garbage (Control) Amendment Act enacted by the Goa legislative assembly in August this year is already law and enforceable. The challenge however is to enforce it from day one which Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has admitted.
In fact, Sawant has said his government will abstain from levying the hefty fines prescribed in the law and instead work towards a more conducive ground situation to enforce the law by ensuring awareness, eliminating availability and making it easier for citizens to avoid one-use plastics.
In his speech at the official state-level function on Gandhi Jayanti at the iconic ‘Gandhi Circle’ at Old Goa on Wednesday morning, Sawant said, cloth bags from the Goa Handicrafts and Rural Small Scale Industries Corporation, will be promoted as an alternative for plastic bags.
He also launched the bags at the program, while reiterating that awareness on the need to eliminate use of plastic bags will be stressed on first by his administration.
He also said, making other alternatives to plastics easily available will be the next stage and eventually the administration will resort to imposition of fines to ensure they are avoided altogether.
How difficult it is to implement a plastic ban on the ground was first experienced by the Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) when exactly a year ago, also on Gandhi Jayanti day, the then Commissioner Ajit Roy, IAS, and Mayor Vithal Chopdekar, led a team of corporators and civic officials to descend on the streets of the capital city to “strictly impose” the ban on plastics.
Roy, Chopdekar and the others went around distributing ‘cloth bags’ to citizens and
vendors. They later claimed thousands were given out for free to create awareness of the need to replace plastic carry-bags with these.
The CCP however had to quickly retract as it turned out that the bags they distributed not ‘cloth’ but polypropylene, one of the 11 compounds notified as “non-biodegradable” in law, and therefore banned.
A CCP team had also gone around the market creating awareness and distributing the white poly-propylene bags among vendors. The CCP may have had to back off later but vendors continued to not use plastic and were seen for some weeks their own alternatives - cloth bags and paper. The the situation slipped back to the indiscriminate use of low-micron plastics soon thereafter.
Now, whether the Goa Handicrafts promoted ‘cloth bags’ launched by Sawant on Wednesday to coincide with Gandhi Jayanti can make Goa plastics-free even when the poly-propylene bags failed a year ago in the capital city, is a question which will throw up answers only in the coming weeks and months, if the State administration is serious, that is.
