Together let's rejuvenate ‘untidy' ocean tides

There is a memory the sea keeps that no monsoon can wash away. Walk along any of India's 11,098 kilometres of coastline at first light, and you will find it in the same tide that once carried spice ships to Malabar and pearl divers to the Gulf of Mannar: a restless, ancient rhythm that has shaped how Indians live, trade, worship and dream. But walk that same shore today, and increasingly the tide brings back something else too — a torn fishing net tangled with a shampoo sachet, a turtle hatchling nosing past a bottle cap mistaken for food, a fisherman's morning catch thinner than his father's, and heavier with plastic than with fish. Somewhere between the India that once measured its wealth in coral, cowrie and catch, and the India of today, the ocean began sending us a message written in litter. This is the story of how, over the last decade, we finally began writing back. Rarely defended For too long, the coast lived at the edge of our imagination the way it lived at the edge of our map — visited, admired, occasionally mourned after a cyclone, but rarely defended as a shared inheritance. Ocean governance earlier was, in the main, an administrative afterthought: scattered across departments, driven by disaster response rather than daily stewardship, with no national platform that asked the ordinary citizen — the college student in Kochi, the schoolteacher in Puri, the shopkeeper in Porbandar — to see the sea as theirs to protect. Meanwhile, the threat was quietly compounding. Plastic waste, much of it single-use, was finding its way through our rivers and drains into estuaries and open water, breaking down not into harmlessness but into microplastics — fragments smaller than five millimetres that fish mistake for food, that enter the catch on our plates, and that we now know travel silently up the food chain into our own bodies. Marine animals were dying entangled in abandoned nets. Coral reefs, mangroves and fish stocks that sustain the livelihoods of millions of coastal families were absorbing a slow, invisible injury. It was, by any honest reckoning, one of the most under-addressed environmental challenges of our time, hiding in plain sight along a coastline that touches nine states and four Union Territories. The change What changed was not merely a policy. It was a decision, taken consciously by the Modi Government, that cleanliness could no longer be treated as somebody else's job — that it had to become, as the Prime Minister put it when he launched the Swachh Bharat Mission in 2014, a Jan Andolan, a movement of the people. That civilisational instinct — Mission LiFE, a Lifestyle for Environment that asks each citizen to make sustainability a daily habit rather than an occasional virtue — has since travelled from our streets to our shores. As the Ministry entrusted with the science of our oceans, atmosphere and Earth systems, we asked ourselves a simple question: if India could mobilise a nation to clean its cities, could it not do the same for its seas? The answer arrived in 2022, in the form of Swachh Sagar Surakshit Sagar — Clean Seas, Safe Coasts — a campaign conceived not as a one-day photo opportunity but as a sustained, science-backed, citizen-powered movement, timed each year to converge with International Coastal Cleanup Day, the third Saturday of September, a global tradition that began in 1986 and today draws volunteers in more than a hundred countries to their nearest coastline with nothing but gloves, bags and resolve. The comparison, even within this campaign's own short life, tells its own story of scale. In its first year, Swachh Sagar Surakshit Sagar ran for 75 days and reached 75 locations, largely through the efforts of our own ocean research institutes. It was a beginning, not a triumph. But as other ministries joined hands, as voluntary organisations such as Seema Jagran Manch and ParyavaranSanrakshanGatividhi lent their networks, and as the idea began to travel by word of mouth along the coast, that same campaign, within the same year, had grown to touch 836 coastal locations and mobilise more than a lakh volunteers. That is not incremental growth; that is a movement finding its feet and then finding its stride. Coalition widens Four editions later, as we launch Swachh Sagar Surakshit Sagar 5.0 this September, the coalition has widened further still — the Indian Coast Guard and Navy, the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, the NCC and NSS, Scouts and Guides, schools, universities, corporates and, crucially, fisherfolk associations and women's groups who know these waters as intimately as their own courtyards. Our own institutes — the National Institute of Ocean Technology in Chennai, the National Centre for Coastal Research, INCOIS in Hyderabad, and sister institutions along both coasts — are coordinating clean-up drives across more than a hundred beaches this year alone, with partners like Bisleri independently bringing another 50 locations under the same banner. This is what a Jan Andolan looks like when it matures: not one ministry acting alone, but a nation showing up. What makes this year's edition distinctive is not only its reach but its rhythm. From September 12 to 19, the coastline will host, in effect, a week-long festival of stewardship rather than a single ceremonial gesture. There will be a cyclothon along both the eastern and western seaboards, young people pedalling from town to town in a living relay of intent. There will be a Fit India morning on the sands, a marathon, and on World Ozone Day, a clean-up drive that quietly reminds us that the health of the atmosphere above and the ocean below are two chapters of the same story. There will be a human chain along our beaches, hands linked from Gujarat to the Sundarbans, from Kanyakumari to the Andamans, and an Ocean Olympiad that turns marine science into a contest young minds will remember long after the trophies are handed out. Students will compete in drawing and essay competitions that ask them to imagine the sea their children will inherit. Young volunteers will ride to the beach in the Bike-to-Beach campaign and post their clean-up as an Eco-Selfie, because a movement that wants to last must also learn to speak the language of the generation that will carry it forward. And on the 19th, International Coastal Cleanup Day itself, it will all converge in the campaign's largest single-day clean-up, geo-tagged and digitally logged so that every bag of waste collected becomes data, not just diligence — a record we can measure, publish and improve upon next year. Movement's backbone That last detail matters more than it seems. Technology has quietly become this movement's backbone: volunteers register digitally, drives are mapped and geo-tagged in real time, and participants receive digital certificates that turn a morning of hard, sweaty work into a recognised act of citizenship. This is governance choosing to trust its citizens with data and, in turn, being held accountable by them. But behind every statistic in this campaign is a face I keep returning to when I think about why this work matters. It is the fisherman off the Odisha coast who tells you his net now needs an extra hour of sorting before the catch is clean enough to sell. It is the mother in a Keralam fishing hamlet who worries less about polio these days and more about what her children's food carries invisibly within it. It is the small hotel owner in Goa or Puducherry whose livelihood depends entirely on a beach staying beautiful enough for a family to want to return to it next year. Clean seas are not an abstraction for these citizens; they are grocery money, school fees, and the health of a child. When we speak of the Blue Economy — of oceans as engines of trade, tourism, fisheries and energy that can power a Viksit Bharat — we are also speaking, in the most literal sense, about their kitchen tables. I have often said that India's relationship with nature was never meant to be transactional; it was meant to be filial. Swachh Sagar Surakshit Sagar is, at its heart, an attempt to recover that relationship at scale — to turn every citizen who has ever stood at the edge of the water and felt something ancient stir in them into an active custodian of that feeling. We are not asking India to fall in love with its coastline. That love was always there, written into our festivals, our fishing songs, our pilgrimages to the sea. We are simply asking India to act on it, one beach, one bag of plastic, one Saturday in September at a time — until safe seas are no longer a season's campaign, but simply how we live. The writer is Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences; Minister of State, PMO, Department of Atomic Energy, Department of Space, and Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions Published on September 7, 2026