Gareth Cliff’s Mumbai insult ignores Durban’s own plastic pollution crisis

On August 29, broadcaster Gareth Cliff reposted a clip of Mumbai's Juhu Beach carpeted in plastic after a monsoon high tide and added a single line: he never wanted to go to India, "what a disgusting place".

The clip, first circulated by the account @RadioGenoa on August 28, shows joggers picking their way through rubbish on the sand. Within hours, the post had divided his audience and generated headlines.

The reaction was swift. South Africans of Indian descent called the remark ignorant and disrespectful to a country that carried the heritage of roughly 1,7 million of our own citizens.

Others noted, more gently, that one clip cannot stand in for 1,4 billion people, and that our own coastline is hardly a model.

That second point deserved far more attention than it received.

The Juhu footage is real, ugly and not new.

In mid-July, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) reported that close to 350 tonnes of marine debris was washing onto Juhu every day after more than 1,000mm of rain fell in early July, and that about 1,800 tonnes had been cleared and disposed of in 10 days.

Rain flushes waste from drains and creeks into the Arabian Sea and the tide brings it back.

The same scene was filmed in June; in 2019 the municipality removed 430 tonnes from the same beach.

None of this excuses it, and Indian critics have been harsher on their own city than Cliff was.

The leader of the opposition in the municipal council called the July build-up a failure of civic management and demanded a white paper on sanitation.

Commentary circulating with the clip asks why one of Mumbai's busiest beaches still lacks enough bins, why vendors are still permitted to sell in single-use plastic, and why littering is not policed.

That criticism counts, because it comes from people who live with the consequences.

What Cliff offered instead was a verdict on 1,4 billion people from a 30-second clip filmed by someone else. That is not commentary. It is a reflex.

Before we lecture Mumbai, consider the mouth of the uMngeni River. After the April 2019 floods, Greenpeace Africa published photographs of Blue Lagoon buried under plastic and said the images summed up South Africa's plastic crisis.

Researchers had already flagged the uMngeni mouth as a critical entry point for plastic, and a widely cited global study ranked South Africa eleventh out of 192 countries for mismanaged plastic waste reaching the ocean.

The Northern Wastewater Treatment Works discharges poorly treated effluent into the uMngeni, which enters the sea at Blue Lagoon.

The national government warned eThekwini in writing months before the 2022 floods.

In January 2025, the city was instructed to prohibit fishing and recreation from the estuary to Blue Lagoon because of pollution. In December 2025, a day after a court found that the municipality had failed in its duty to prevent sewage spills into its rivers and the sea, Blue Lagoon and three other central beaches were closed again.

That is a coastline serving 63 million people, not 1,4 billion.

Greater Mumbai alone, at around 22 million, holds roughly a third of South Africa's entire population on a fraction of the land, and what washes onto Juhu is drawn from a coastline of thousands of kilometres, not one suburb. Scale changes the arithmetic of a clean-up, not the principle.

The sea returns what we throw in, in Durban as in Mumbai.

The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that between 19 and 23 million tonnes of plastic leak into lakes, rivers and seas every year, with more than 11 million tonnes reaching the ocean.

Research in Science Advances found that more than a thousand rivers, most of them small urban rivers running through cities, carry about 80 percent of the plastic that reaches the sea. Juhu sits at one end of that pipe. So does Blue Lagoon.

Had Cliff looked past the clip, he would have found a better story. In October 2015, a Mumbai lawyer, Afroz Shah, began picking up rubbish on Versova Beach with an elderly neighbour.

The effort grew into what the United Nations called the world's largest beach clean-up, removing thousands of tonnes of waste from a 2,5km stretch buried up to five feet deep, and earned Shah UNEP's Champions of the Earth award in 2016.

In March 2018, olive ridley turtle hatchlings emerged on Versova for the first time in roughly two decades.

Amitabh Bachchan, as ambassador for the Banega Swachh India campaign, led a 12-hour clean-up on Juhu in October 2016 and later gifted Shah an excavator and a tractor for the Versova effort.

Repeated drives at Juhu, including one after the 2025 Ganesh immersions led by Akshay Kumar and Amruta Fadnavis, keep the issue in public view.

In part. Versova was transformed and its upkeep has since been contracted out.

Juhu still fills with debris every monsoon because the problem sits upstream in the drains, not on the sand.

That is the honest assessment, and exactly the constructive point a commentator with a large platform could have made. India is moving forward on waste infrastructure.

On the evidence of our own court judgments, we are moving the other way.

Cliff built his career on saying what others would not, and the record shows this is method rather than accident.

In 2011, the ANC Youth League called for his removal from Idols after he described Polokwane contestants as charming but not talented.

In January 2016, M-Net dropped him over a tweet during the Penny Sparrow furore; he sued, was reinstated by the High Court, and later published a memoir subtitled Confessions of a Shock Jock, in which he described the episode as a fight to show social media's loudmouths that he could not be bullied.

In October 2021, Nando's ended a five-year sponsorship of his show after he told a guest that her personal experience of racism was anecdotal and unimportant.

Each time, the outrage became the story and the audience grew. Controversy is his business model, and a skilfully run one.

None of that means he should be silenced.

But candour and contempt are different things, and reach carries obligations. Most of us have places we would rather not visit.

We do not announce it to a national audience, and we do not judge 1,4 billion people on a stranger's thirty-second clip. That choice says more about the commentator than about the country.

A broadcaster whose audience includes some 1,7 million Indian South Africans chose to call their ancestral home disgusting, without a word about what washes up on the beaches of the city where much of that community lives.

The measure of commentary is whether it makes anything better.

This did not. It insulted a sizeable share of his own public, told Mumbai nothing it did not already know, and let Durban off the hook.

The sea does not check passports. Neither should our outrage.

Sanjith Hannuman is a director at AVIB and an employee benefits consultant who holds an MBA from UKZN, is an FSA of the Financial Planning Institute of South Africa, a Human Values Practitioner, and a Behavioural Life Coach who believes in the betterment of life for all.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or post.co.za