Popularity threatens to turn a once romantic destination into a sewer

Before managing the Barracuda diving club in Goa's Sun Village resort, Venkatesh Charloo worked on a trading desk in a Hong Kong bank. After watching a Cousteau film he decided to quit the world of finance and get into deep sea diving. Now, 15 years later, he is very angry. "The islands off Goa are covered in garbage, and there are fewer and fewer fish." Part of his job is to clean up diving sites at the beginning of the tourist season. Goa survived four centuries of Portuguese colonisation and an influx of hippies in the 1960s, but today it is threatened by mass tourism. More than 2.5 million tourists visit this small state in south-west India every year, twice as many as 10 years ago, with a local population of just 1.5 million. National Geographic has ranked Goa's beaches among the worst in the world. Few would complain about the cows lying on the sand under the parasols. They are, after all, sacred, but beer bottles and plastic bags litter most beaches and only the distant sunsets remain untouched. They are what made Goa's reputation as a romantic destination, with local government advertising urging travellers to make their wives their girlfriends again. However, the proliferation of faecal coliform bacteria may well disturb the promised idyll. According to a study by the Goa based National Institute of Oceanography, levels of potentially dangerous bacteria, such as salmonella, rose sharply between 2002 and 2007. The report, published last July in the journal Ecological Indicators, concluded that increasingly strong concentrations of faecal coliform and other pathogenic bacteria in the coastal waters were a threat to the environment as well as to human health. In some places, swimming could lead to disease . At the mouth of the Mandovi river, currents sweep sewage down from the hotels, along with residue from pesticides used by the farmers up country, and the sediment from nearby mines. Underwater visibility has been considerably reduced. "You can't see further than your own nose now," said Ajey Patil, a deep-sea diving instructor. Environmental activists condemn the apathy of the local authorities. "The government wants to build a five-star hotel along every mile, but it can't even build waste water treatment plants," said Claude Alvares director of an environmental action group, Goa Foundation. The construction of more than 2,600 hotels has also destroyed the khazans, an ancient network of dykes and wetlands that drew off sea water when levels rose too high and protected the land from flooding. Another form of pollution, not seen on the beaches, is household refuse. A few kilometres inland, plastic waste floats on monsoon-flooded fields and mounds of garbage are stacked up along the roads. "It's difficult to find available land to set up a waste processing plant," said Swapnil Naik, who heads the Goa state tourism department. The sarpanch, or village mayors, complain about being landed with the problem. "They consider it a degrading task, not suited to their status," said a local, who does the rounds at night to prevent people from throwing garbage on his village's land. Although the state of Goa is aware of the environmental threat, it cannot dispense with the manna that is tourism. A third of all jobs depend on the tourist industry, which generates $240m a year. It would be a gamble to entice fewer tourists and concentrate on high-end holidays. Most of the tourists on the coast are backpackers, although recently large numbers of Russian and east European tourists have been arriving on charter flights, and restaurant menus are now translated into Russian. "We would like to build golf courses and amusement parks to attract a superior clientele," said Swapnil Naik. Another solution would be to relieve the pressure on the beaches by developing inland tourism during the off-season in the monsoon. Goa has a fascinating architectural heritage from its Portuguese colonisers and has many less-known sites of natural beauty, such as waterfalls deep in the forests. Villagers can now get subsidies for opening small hotels in these new tourist destinations. But according to Alvares: "The government's idea of development is to open ever more hotels, for more tourists and more money, but at this rate we're heading straight into the wall." He is counting on the law – or rather legal lethargy – to temper the government's ardour. "My weapon isn't a gun, but the legal proceedings governing public interest cases," he said. Alvares is quite nostalgic for the 1960s. "At least the hippies were environmentally friendly." This story originally appeared in Le Monde