Ganeshotsav brings out the best of Mumbai every year, ten days of colour, music and devotion across the city. But once the final idols are immersed, someone has to deal with what's left behind. This year, that job was bigger than usual. The BMC recovered 2,754.85 metric tonnes of waste from Mumbai's shorelines over the festival period, a rise of nearly 40 percent over 2025. At Dadar Chowpatty, flowers, cloth, plastic and decorative material lined the shore long after the festivities had ended.

That is where more than 150 of our students from K.P.B. Hinduja College of Commerce showed up.

A Festival Doesn't End When the Celebrations Do

Our students joined the BMC, the University of Mumbai, the Maharashtra State administration and the Indian Coast Guard for a post-Visarjan clean-up drive, organised through the college's National Service Scheme (NSS) unit. Across several metres of shoreline, they collected and sorted plastic bottles, wrappers, cloth and other immersion debris, working the way any civic clean-up crew would: hands-on, unglamorous, and effective.

It's worth understanding why this waste matters so much. Much of it comes from Plaster of Paris idols, which do not dissolve the way traditional clay ones do. Left behind, that material can affect water quality and eventually washes back up along beaches. The single heaviest day of recovery citywide came right after the final immersion, when over 500 MT was cleared in a day. Citywide, K West ward, home to Juhu beach, recorded the highest recovery this year, followed by D ward, which covers Girgaon Chowpatty and Malabar Hill, and G North ward, home to Dadar and Mahim.

What the Day Actually Felt Like for Our Students

For second-year BAF student and DLLE student manager Ritika Kanojiya, the morning offered a lesson no lecture hall could match. Physically clearing the waste herself, she found, made the environmental problem feel real in a way that discussion never had. It also happened to be her birthday, and she couldn't have imagined a better way to mark it.

First-year BCom student Prajakta Kulkarni went in expecting a straightforward waste pickup. Standing on the shoreline changed that entirely, giving her a much sharper sense of how large the pollution problem actually was. The morning also reshaped how she thought about accountability: keeping shared spaces clean, she realised, isn't a job that belongs only to civic authorities or sanitation staff. It falls on everyone who uses those spaces.

Third-year BCom student and NSS leader Sarvesh Dubey saw the drive as something to pass forward. For him, showing up today is how the example gets set for juniors who might take up the same responsibility next year.

Why Our College Keeps Showing Up

This wasn't a one-off gesture for us. Hinduja College has run beach clean-up drives for more than 25 years, with our NSS unit organising three to four such initiatives annually alongside blood donation camps and tree plantation drives. Principal Dr Navin M Punjabi sees this as core to what the college stands for: preparing students not just for careers, but for the responsibilities of being engaged citizens beyond the classroom.

That framing matters in a city like Mumbai, where beaches and public spaces are shared by millions, and where debris left behind doesn't just disappear. It eventually reaches the ocean, adding pressure to marine ecosystems already under strain. It's a reminder that the values we teach at Hinduja College extend well past the syllabus.

A Morning That Stuck With Them

By the end of the drive, our students were tired and their hands were dirty, but what they took away went beyond any single bag of waste collected. A few hours on the shoreline was enough to prove a simple point: small individual efforts genuinely add up when enough people choose to make them.

At Hinduja College, that belief is built into how we prepare our students, not only for careers, but for the responsibilities that come with being part of a city. If enough people gave one morning a year, Mumbai's beaches would look very different, and our students are proud to have played their part this year.

Want to be part of the next drive? Get involved with the NSS unit at Hinduja College and find out how you can contribute.