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.

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.

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........

© The Statesman