Documented by Goa Desc Resource Centre Ph:2252660
Website: www.goadesc.org Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Press Clippings on the web: http://www.goadesc.org/mem/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------- Drownings and Us ------------------------- Human tragedies have struck on the beaches even before the tourist season has gone into full swing. Deaths due to drowning are becoming a regularity, much like the deaths on roads of Goa.
An awful share of the blame for these tragedies must go � sad to say� to the victims. Almost all of them are tourists who brush aside all the odds and jump into the sea for a swim risking their lives.
The Goans live here and are aware of the risks: or they are fishermen and other communities living close by the sea who have in course of their upbringing cultivated the skills to tackle the coastal waters.
The tourists who usually perish in the swimming adventure happen to be younger people. Sometimes they are students coming for excursion with a teacher; sometimes they are a small group of employed youths out on a picnic in Goa from neighbouring states. They are itching for adventure; and they end up as a human tragedy.
While blaming the victims, however, we cannot ignore that the government has not done enough to prevent the tragedies. Putting up boards warning people not to swim in the waters is just the beginning of the responsibility, not the end of it.
And are there warning signs in all the needed places? There are instances in which warning boards which were there some days ago are not there or are turned askew by someone or disfigured. If we have to make our warnings really scary we have to place signs all over the beaches. Then nobody will fail to notice.
Alternatively we can put up large hoardings on the beaches to force everyone to notice them. On some beaches we have a large board at the entrance to the beaches, but they are so full of text that they read like a book. What we are asking for are huge hoardings with strong visuals and a simple, gripping, moving line that have the power of recall.
An advertising agency, working gratis for an organisation helping victims of child sexual abuse in the US, designed a hoarding which showed a half-hidden picture of a small girl and carried this line: ��Long before September the 11th many US children already knew terror.�� This hoarding proved so powerful that it drew many more to the cause of abuse victims, both celebrities and ordinary people.
In order to make people heed the warnings on the danger of swimming on the beaches we have to find a genius in the advertising agencies who can design a similarly powerful hoarding for us.
The next step should be the posting of an adequate number of life guards. Although every year we lose about 40 or so tourists or locals in drowning on the beaches, the government has still not sorted out the problems of the life guards which are galore. Over the years their complaints have centred round salary, security of service, quantum of workload and equipment. There is no intention here to belittle the work done by the life guards. Some of them have saved lives at their own risk. And most of them have continued to work under unsatisfactory conditions.
But the truth remains that the presence of life guards is not felt on the beaches. This is the second problem, apart from unattractive, boring or leaning or faded or missing warning signs, which is indirectly abetting the death of 40 people annually on the beaches.
Overall, whether it is the ineffectiveness of the warnings signs or the life guards, the problem is that the presence of government itself is not felt on the beaches.
A number of boats have been cruising the beaches with tourists without any licence from government. The boats have no safety equipment, not even enough tubes to float with if a drowning passenger wants to. The operators pack their boats with as many tourists as possible. Tourists come usually from landlocked states and do not know swimming; but even those who know would not know how to reach the shore if the boat overturns in a surprise turn of the waves. And nothing will happen to the operators, because the government does not the names of boat owners in their register. A tragedy actually took place last year off a North Goa beach when some tourists were drowned as a boat overturned.
Human tragedies will continue to occur unless the government and civil society change their attitude to them. Deaths on the beaches cannot be taken as fatalism. Nations which have developed beach tourism have also developed mechanisms to prevent human tragedies occurring.
We can at least begin by reducing the scale of it by giving up our attitude of indifference and enforcing the preventive measures in a powerful and effective manner. --------------------------------------------------------------- Editorial in The Navhind Times 9/10/03 page 10 ---------------------------------------------------------------
======================================= GOA DESC RESOURCE CENTRE Documentation + Education + Solidarity 11 Liberty Apts., Feira Alta, Mapusa, Goa 403 507 Tel: 2252660 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] website: www.goadesc.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Working On Issues Of Development & Democracy =======================================
########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
