“When We Met the Ocean” – WCC Training Session at BMM Department, St. Andrew’s College.

On Friday the 17^th, February 2017, the students of St. Andrews College’s BMM department were privileged to be given the opportunity to meet Ms. Shibani Sachdeva.  Ms. Shibani is a sailor and environmental enthusiast. Her love for the ocean and our surroundings sees no bounds. She had come to visit the BMM department with the purpose of spreading awareness amongst the youth to make them more vigilant of the ocean condition and the problems that lay ahead, the cause, the effect, and how can it be prevented by us all coming together.

Ms. Shibani spent most of her youth and early years sailing and has also accompanied sailing teams across the world for various championships in Singapore, England, Dubai and Spain  and working in the development sector. Presently, she is spearheading the ocean cleanup campaign for Water Conservation Community to create awareness, sustainability with conscious efforts and working together with citizens and the government.. Water Conservation Community cares for the oceans, the beaches, and the marine life and strives to protect and secure it.

WCC began visiting beaches for research to understand the challenges faced. They interacted with the koli community and tried to understand the barriers and reasons for current conditions and polluted beaches.

Human’s fails to realise that survival of our species requires that our oceans be kept alive as our oceans supply 75% of the oxygen we breathe.   We are dependent on the oceans Yet we don’t take care of it and pollute it, waste it miserably. By dumping plastic and chemicals we are killing and endangering the aquatic life that helps the maintainance of the oxygen quotient. If we do not save water and maintain water, there will be no life sooner or later. Life will come to an end and it would be because of us.

Ms. Shibani rightly said “All of these problems started because of the previous generations. Because of their myopia, perghaps their greed and selfishness,. Our oceans and planet is compromised,  degraded and polluted. they are doing absolutely nothing to save our earth, its therefore our earth and perhaps not theirs”.

‘The current generation needs to wake up and take responsibility of their earth. .

To help solve these ocean problems, the Earth Volunteers training session was conducted at the BMM Dept of St.Andrew’s College.” We need to come together to protect our community by saving water and protecting the coast ines, so that the future generations can lead their life in a better way than ours. A future which is cleaner than today and where citizens are more responsible for their surroundings. Ms. Shibani has a dream of creating “10,000 Earth Volunteers”. An earth volunteer is expected to give 24 hours of their time in 3 months to keep the coast lines clean. The volunteer is expected to be present for at least 1  day  a week and only for 2 hours at the beach and is trained to clean the beaches and interact with the local bodies to create awareness about the importance for ocean cleanliness and environment protection and the effects it has on us. If a minimum of 30 students from every college, come together to clean up and maintain the beaches, we will be able to restore our beaches and drive change in the community. The job is hard but very achievable and results would be visible within 6 months.

The first project of Water Conservation Community is the Clean-up at the Chimbai Beach so that the BMC along with the help of the community will be able to restore Chimbai Beach and make it beautiful again. The Chimbai Beach Clean Up project will be launched on Sun 19^th Feb’ 17 and on the following Sunday 26th February at 7 am, WCC will bring Art on the beach for an ecological cause.

Further Prof. Omkar Bhatkar, who is actively supporting this initiative explained about marine diversity and ecological importance of it. he explained us how fragile is the ocean system and the intrinsic need for all of us to come together to save the environment and make a difference by degrading it any more.

Together we can celebrate the Joy of Water and help protect life and its beautiful offerings. The earth is ours and it is our job to help protect it. This is a great initiative taken by Water Conservation Community and Ms. Shibani inspires the youth to be more responsible for their actions and be actively involved in connecting to our ecosystem with reverance.

Written by Trevin Cutihno and Alvin Anthony