Nauseating trash heaps in India spark citizen cleanup drives

Citizens have put in place volunteer groups that wade through garbage to categorise and dispose it

Lawyer Afroz Shah moved to Mumbai with a dream of looking out at the wild, blue Arabian Sea. What he saw instead was nauseating — waves churning with plastic shopping bags and empty chip packets, beaches covered so thick with soda bottles and snack wrappers he could no longer see the sand.

The coast off India’s financial capital, like so many other places across the South Asian nation, has become choked by garbage tossed without much thought by the millions of people who live there.

“I could have gone to the court. I could have complained” to municipal authorities, said Shah, 34.