A boat ride for a family from Khed, Maharashtra, turned tragic on Christmas day as one of it's members drowned after a local tourist boat that was carrying them with more than 20 passengers capsized almost 60 metres off Calangute beach on Wednesday morning. According to lifesavers, they rescued over 20 passengers aged between 6 and 65 years & two passengers on the boat were found not wearing life jackets, complicating the rescue operation. Well, most boat operators are indeed not seen following proper guidlines and safety norms on most of our Goan beaches in Goa. For e.g. these boat operators are habitually seen filling their vessels with domestic tourists to full capacity and taking them for boat rides even when the sea is rough. I therefore personally feel that the government should take a serious lesson from the above incident and start monitoring the movement of every boat that is used for watersports activity in the state to check whether proper guidelines/safety norms are really followed whilst taking tourists for boat rides and if possible should penalise the boat operators for casually flouting all safety rules leading to people's deaths.
