s pollution, climate change, and overfishing deplete their catch, fishermen of Gujarat and Diu are often forced to move deeper into the sea and risk entering Pakistani waters. The Hindu reports on the dilemma of the deep end
Sanjay Lalji, 28, unloads fish from a mid-sized mechanised trawler at Vanakbara fishing harbour near Diu after a 12-day fishing trip to Goa. As he and his co-workers unload more than three tonnes of fish from the trawler, he gets a message on his mobile phone to schedule a trip two days hence. He will have to leave an hour before dawn. Before setting out, Lalji and his colleagues will have to fill the storage of the vessel with seven to eight tonnes of ice, which is crushed in a machine on the jetty and flows in the storage through a conveyer belt from the crushing machine.
Vanakbara is a fishing village whose 10,000 inhabitants engage in fishing and related activities. The coastal village at the edge of Diu has a jetty with around 900 mechanised trawlers, 250 fibreglass boats and 300 small boats which go out for fishing near Okha, Dwarka on the Gujarat coast and up to Goa and Maharashtra.
Dangers and diminishing returns
The vessels from Vanakbara don’t venture into Jakhau in Kutch where they run the risk of being caught by the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency (PMSA). Fifty-one fishermen from this village are currently languishing in Pakistan jails for years. Not only our men are apprehended, even our boats are taken away by Pakistan, so it’s best to avoid going there, says Anwar Pathan, another fisherman on the boat, who is from small village in Kodinar taluka of Gujarat.
At the time of writing this report, it is estimated that 500 Gujarati fishermen are languishing in Pakistan jails after they were apprehended by the PMSA from the International Maritime Boundary Line off the coast of Gujarat. The Gujarat government pays Rs.200 per day to families whose members have been arrested by Pakistani authorities; the Union Territory administration does the same in Diu and Daman.
Fishermen from India and Pakistan are increasingly being convicted of trespassing even as fishery has become increasingly vital to India’s economic output and technical improvement better boats that enable riskier navigation and climate change alters traditional patterns of fishing.
But there is no other way than to venture deep into the sea in search of a big catch. We have to go deep into the sea, which takes us 12 days and more depending on the catch we get. Sometimes we return in 10 days and sometimes it takes two weeks and even longer if we don’t get enough catch to fill the vessel, says Lalji, as he talks about how the days spent in the sea are getting longer. According to him, this was not the case 10 years ago, when they would return in four or five days with a full catch.
We sometimes don’t even get a boatload of fish after two weeks of fishing on the high seas, he says as he shows the cold storage inside the boat anchored at the jetty.
Lalji had started fishing when he was 16 and it’s been more than a decade spent at sea now. It is a laborious but not remunerative occupation due to dwindling catch and declining high-value fish such as pomfrets, larger sciaenids, threadfins and penaeid prawns.
Suresh Kharva joins the conversation on the boat and tries to explain the economics of fishing. Each trip is around 12 days. Every ship has 8-10 fishermen and one captain to navigate the vessel. For a 12-day trip, we need 2,500 litres of diesel and 8-10 tonnes of ice. Each person is paid Rs.250-300 per day plus food and the tandel or captain is paid Rs.1,000 per day. So effectively, per trip cost works out to around Rs.3 lakh. Now, if we don’t get three tonne good variety fish, we can’t even recover our money, he says.
A major factor cited by the fishermen for the declining catch is an ever expanding vessel fleet 35,150 fishing vessels in all in Gujarat as of 2011 according to the figures provided by the State fisheries department, which has resulted in overcapacity with larger fishing fleets competing for the limited fisheries resource.
The exploited coast
Pollution is the other big factor fishermen cite when asked why they go deeper in the sea risking their lives for a bigger catch. The sea has become very polluted affecting fishing, says Lalji. Says 60-year-old Jivanbhai Baria, who was earlier a fisherman and now runs a beer shop in Vanakbara, Diu: Concentration of industrial corridors like chemical and pharmaceutical units in Vapi and Ankleshwar, petrochemicals in Vadodara, refineries and power plants in Jamnagar, and power plants and ports in Kutch have rendered the sea coast highly polluted and that is directly affecting fishing.
Gujarat is endowed with the country’s longest coastline running into 1,660 km. As per United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) for economic exploitation is delimited to 200 nautical miles (370.4 km) from the coast. Gujarat’s EEE covers 2,14,000 sq km. While its coastal waters are rich in fish resources, with the National Institute of Oceanography’s database listing 306 fish species in the area, the coastline is dotted with industrial corridors comprising chemical and pharmaceutical factories, petrochemical units and refineries, thermal power plants, cement factories, the ship-breaking and recycling corridor in Alang. Thirty five per cent of India’s total cargo is handled by the 42 ports on the Gujarat coast, where more than 10,000 ships move in and out every year.
The Hindu, 2016