In August 2023, broadcaster Gareth Cliff shared a video clip showing Juhu beach in Mumbai covered in plastic after high tide during the monsoon, adding a comment that he never wanted to go to India, calling the place 'disgusting'.
The clip, initially distributed by the @RadioGenoa account on August 28, showed runners navigating through trash on the sand. Within hours of publication, the post caused a division among the audience and attracted media attention.
The reaction was swift: South Africans of Indian descent deemed the remark ignorant and disrespectful to a country that is home to approximately 1.7 million of their citizens. Others more gently noted that one clip cannot represent 1.4 billion people, and that South Africa's own coastline is far from exemplary.
The footage from Juhu is real, unsightly, and not new. In mid-July, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation reported that following over 1000 mm of rainfall in early July, about 350 tons of marine debris washed up on Juhu daily, and approximately 1800 tons were cleaned and disposed of over 10 days.
Rain washes waste from drains and streams into the Arabian Sea, and the tide brings it back. A similar scene was filmed in June; in 2019, the municipality removed 430 tons from the same beach.
However, this does not justify his statement, and Indian critics were harsher on their city than Cliff. The opposition leader in the municipal council called the July situation a failure of civic governance and demanded a sanitation report.
Comments on the video raise questions about why there are still not enough bins on one of Mumbai's busiest beaches, why vendors are allowed to sell single-use plastic, and why there is no fight against litter. This criticism carries weight because it comes from people who face the consequences.
Instead, Cliff passed judgment on 1.4 billion people based on a 30-second clip filmed by someone else. This is not a comment, but a reaction.
Before criticizing Mumbai, one should look at the Umgeni River estuary. After floods in April 2019, Greenpeace Africa published photos of the Blue Lagoon buried under plastic, stating that these images reflected South Africa's plastic crisis.
Researchers had previously noted the Umgeni estuary as a critical entry point for plastic, and a widely cited global study ranked South Africa eleventh out of 192 countries for improper management of plastic waste reaching the ocean.
Furthermore, there is the issue of sewage. The northern treatment plant discharges insufficiently treated wastewater into the Umgeni, which flows into the sea near the Blue Lagoon. The national government had warned the town of Eketevini in writing months before the 2022 floods.
In January 2025, the town was ordered to ban fishing and recreation in the estuary leading to the Blue Lagoon due to pollution. In December 2025, one day after the court ruled that the municipality had failed in its duty to prevent the discharge of wastewater into rivers and the sea, the Blue Lagoon and three other central beaches were closed again.
This coast serves 63 million people, not 1.4 billion. Greater Mumbai alone, with about 22 million people, accounts for roughly a third of all of South Africa's population in a small area, and what washes up on Juhu comes from a coastline spanning thousands of kilometers, not just one suburb. The scale changes the arithmetic of cleanup, but not the principle.
The sea returns what we throw away, whether in Durban or Mumbai.
The UN Environment Programme estimates that between 19 and 23 million tons of plastic enter lakes, rivers, and seas annually, with over 11 million tons reaching the ocean. A study in Science Advances showed that over a thousand rivers, most of which are small urban rivers flowing through cities, carry about 80 percent of the plastic reaching the sea. Juhu is at one end of this pipe, as is the Blue Lagoon.
If Cliff had looked beyond the clip, he would have found a better story. In October 2015, a Mumbai lawyer, Afroz Shah, began cleaning trash on Versova beach with an old neighbor. This effort evolved into the world's largest beach cleanup, recognized by the United Nations, resulting in thousands of tons of waste being removed from a 2.5 km stretch, five feet deep, and Shah received the UNEP 'Champions of the Earth' award in 2016.
In March 2018, olive ridley turtle hatchlings appeared on Versova for the first time in nearly two decades. Amitabh Bachchan, acting as an ambassador for the Banega Swachh India campaign, led a 12-hour cleanup on Juhu in October 2016, and later gifted Shah an excavator and tractor for efforts on Versova.
Repeated cleanups on Juhu, including one after the 2025 Ganges submergence led by Akshay Kumar and Amruta Fadnavis, keep this issue in the public eye. Has success been achieved? Partially. Versova has been transformed, and its maintenance has since been contracted out. Juhu continues to fill with trash every monsoon because the problem lies upstream in the drains, not on the sand. This is an honest assessment, and it is precisely the constructive point a commentator with a large platform could make.
India is moving forward in waste infrastructure. However, based on the decisions of our courts, we are moving backward.
Cliff built his career on saying what others won't, and recordings show this is a method, not a coincidence. In 2011, the Youth League ANC called for his removal from the Idols competition after he described contestants from Polokwane as charming but not talented. In January 2016, M-Net ceased cooperation with him due to a tweet during the Penny Sparrow scandal; he sued, was reinstated by the High Court, and later published memoirs titled Confessions of a Shock Jock, in which he described this episode as a fight to show social media loudmouths that he couldn't be intimidated.
In October 2021, Nando's ended its five-year sponsorship of his show after he told a guest that her personal experience of racism was anecdotal and insignificant. Each time anger became a story, and the audience grew. Controversy is his business model, and it is well managed.
None of this means he should be silenced. But candor and contempt are different, and influence carries responsibilities. Most of us have places we prefer not to visit. We do not announce this to a national audience or condemn 1.4 billion people based on someone else's thirty-second clip. This choice says more about the commentator than about the country.
The broadcaster, whose audience includes about 1.7 million South African Indians, decided to call his homeland disgusting without mentioning a word about what washes up on the beaches of the city where much of this community lives. The measure of the comment is whether it improves anything. It did not. He offended a significant part of his audience, told Mumbai nothing it didn't already know, and absolved Durban of responsibility. The sea does not check passports. Nor should our rage.
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