India’s vast coastline more than 8,000 kilometres long is a rich fishing ground. It supports a thriving marine fisheries industry, which contributes to the country’s food security while supporting about four million fisherfolk and their families. The face of India’s marine fishing, however, has been changing over the past few decades. Once dominated by small-scale and artisanal fisherfolk who fished mostly for subsistence, marine fishing has now become commercial and industrialized with bigger vessels such as trawlers and purse seines catching larger volumes of fish at one go. Often, this transition from traditional to commercial fishing has led to the disgruntlement of the local fishing communities. In some parts of the world, commercial large-scale fisheries use migrant labour from different parts of the same, or a different, country. These migrant workers sometimes trafficked and enslaved make for cheap labour and have been known to live in deplorable conditions aboard the fishing vessels. The Thai fishing industry, for example, is replete with stories of horrifying practices. Media reports have shed light on how labour used aboard Thai fishing vessels frequently hail from other countries like Cambodia, lured across borders by traffickers. These migrant workers often have little prior experience fishing, are physically abused by the fleet owners, and spend days or months in appalling conditions. In India, too, the rapidly expanding industrialized fishing operations along the Indian coast seem to be seeking out migrant labour to fulfil their large manpower needs. The conditions aboard these fishing vessels are similar to the conditions on the Thai fishing vessels that use sea slaves, said Divya Karnad, a graduate student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA, who is also affiliated with the Foundation for Ecological Research Advocacy and Learning (FERAL), Pondicherry, India. According to Karnad, the migrant labourers frequently work long hours without formal contracts, live in severely unhygienic conditions, suffer from frequent wounds and infections, and receive little or no medical care, personal space, safety equipment or community support. However, Karnad said she hasn’t heard any reports of the men being physically abused or enslaved, so the situation seems much better than that of Southeast Asia.