By
N Sathiya Moorthy
Independent of the media-hype on all ‘controversial things’ that the Tamil Nadu Government and Chief Minister Jayalalithaa may be saying on the ‘fishing issue’, they have also quietly initiated steps over the past couple of years which could lead to reduction of tensions with Sri Lanka on the Palk Bay front. It is sad however that the media do not see it nor do they get to see it as the State Government seems keen on projecting not the ‘positive steps’ on this score.
Finance Minister O Panneerselvam did not say as much when he presented the State’s Budget for 2013-14 in the Legislative Assembly on March 21. His hope that the Government aid for deep-sea fishing will “slowly wean away our fishermen from unsustainable trawler-fishing in shallow waters to sustainable deep-sea fishing” however is a step in the right direction, as it could help wean them away from the Sri Lankan waters, as well. Rather, that could be one sector where the effectiveness of the Government initiative can actually be seen and felt, for the rest of the State’s coastal fishers to be inspired and to follow.
In encouraging the State’s fishers to take to the deep-sea, Minister Panneerselvam was only referring to the two-year-old unacknowledged initiative of the State Government in this respect. In the first Budget after Jayalalithaa returned to power as Chief Minister for the third time, Minister Panneerselvam, in his 2011-12 Budget, earmarked for the first time 25 crores to encourage deep-sea fishing. In the current Budget speech, he said, “In order to promote deep-sea fishing, the existing 25 per cent subsidy will be enhanced to 50 per cent to fishermen for procuring new tuna long-liners, and a sum of ‘ 30 crores will be set apart for this purpose.”
Budget 2011-12 promised that the State Government would build up a string of 20 cold-storage plants for fishers along the State’s long coast to store their produce, for sufficient periods to ensure favourable price in the local and international markets. At present, much of this business in Tamil Nadu has been cornered by one or two local companies or those from neighbouring States. In the past, however, the few cold storages that the State Government built for the fishers fell into disuse in the absence of adequate education and exposure of the fishers, timely repairs to equipment, poor marketing and management expertise, as promised.
Budget 2011-12 also provided for the Government setting up a fisheries university in the southern coastal belt around Nagapattinam, for the fisher family children to adapt to modern means of fishing and marketing techniques. In the years and decades to come, fishing in the nearby shallow waters across much of the Tamil Nadu coast is going to be problematic for a variety of reasons. The non-availability of fish is the reason. There are equal or greater concerns even along those coastlines where the catch has not depleted as such.
Post-Budget, Chief Minister Jayalalithaa also made a suo motu statement in the State Assembly, announcing a 75 per cent subsidy in the total cost of ‘ 20,000 for installing VHF transmitters on the 1,600 trawlers in Tamil Nadu, most of which do not have such communication transmitters at present. She said that the Government would install transmission towers all along the coast for the fishers in mid-sea to access land without difficulty.
Equally important, if not more in this context, was the Chief Minister’s announcement that the Government would provide 75 per cent subsidy likewise on the ‘ 250,000 cost of the multi-channel HV equipment for installation in deep-sea vessels staying at sea for a month and more. She said that the Government would set up on-shore control-rooms, to be manned by the Fisheries Department. The Government would allocate ‘ 8.5 crores for the project, the Chief Minister announced on the occasion.
Polluting the disturbed waters
Jayalalithaa also referred to the effective implementation of the existing diesel and kerosene subsidy scheme, and to the doubling the ‘ban period’ grant for fishers to 4000 after her Government came to office. For years now, a 45-day ban period has been in force, beginning April 15, for boats and trawlers, to go out to the sea, so as not to disturb the fishing-beds in the seas, to ensure reproduction and better catch, consequently. It should be said to the credit of the fishers that they have respected the ban, and few violations are reported.
Large-scale industrialisation along the Tamil Nadu coast also can spell further doom to fishing in the coming years and decades. Proposals to set up more ports and consequent hopes for port-dependent industries could change the face of Tamil Nadu’s shores. The nearby waters could get disturbed and polluted, leading to a further depletion of fish stocks and catch. The employment and the dependability patterns, basing family incomes exclusively on fishing, could also change.
In a way, there could be lack of traditional skills and fishers with those skills to exploit the marine resources where they are available – both for local consumption, and consequent maintenance of required protein levels in the local population, and also for overseas market-exploitation. Given the natural rise in consumption and fast-depleting stocks closer to the coast for these additional reasons, there will be greater and more urgent need for adopting to new and more successful means of exploiting deep-sea fishing.
The Budget proposals now for the State Government to meet half the cost of the long-line tuna boats thus is an improvement on the scheme announced in 2011. This possibly owed to inputs from the fishers on the high cost of these boats, which they could ill-afford. The loan-cum-lease system being followed in the purchase of fishing boats, with the boat-owner(s)’ catch as the bait comes with a price for traditional fishers. Already, there are complaints about non-traditional fishers from non-fishing communities, particularly along the Palk Bay area crowding the traditional fishers out of business, if not wholly.
There is however a need to improve methods of, and training in deep-sea fishing. In the troubled Palk Strait region, for instance, the tradition has been for fishers to stay out in the sea only for a night at a time. Deep-sea fishing, when fishers and their boats stay out in the distant seas for days, and at times weeks together, will require a cultural re-orientation for those fishers. Against this, fishers in Toothoor village down south in Kanyakumari district, owing to a different cultural orientation, have been into deep-sea fishing for decades and centuries now.
However, the problems faced by and from the two are not entirely dissimilar. While the Palk Bay fishers are often apprehended by the Sri Lanka Nary in the nearer seas, the Thoothoor fishers get caught in the distant Gulf waters, for similar violation. Kanyakumari fishers have been caught fishing in local boats and ships in the Gulf-Arab region, more often than not without valid documents.
Taking a leaf out of counterparts in the Palk Bay and Nagapatinam regions up north in the State, southern fisher families too have started protesting in public lately when their bread-winners are harassed in those countries, not always for want of documents. The Centre is still engaged in sorting out an incident in which a Ramanathapuram fisherman was killed, and two others injured when a US Navy ship fired at them, off the Dubai coast.
Through the three-decade-long ‘Eelam Wars’ in Sri Lanka, the LTTE’s much-feared ‘Sea Tigers’ wing had been known to target Tamil Nadu fishers, one way or the other. In the only proven case of LTTE harassment, the Maldivian Coast Guard freed an Indian fishing vessel, ‘Sri Krishna’, along with its abducted on-board engineer from the LTTE’s possession and use months after it had reportedly been targeted by the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN). The ‘Sea Tigers’ were using the vessel for smuggling and transferring weapons, mid-sea.
Deep-sea fishing and mother-ships
The Tamil Nadu Government’s scheme for funding long-line tuna boats is aimed at improving the lives and livelihood of all fishers across the Tamil Nadu coast. It has immediate relevance and application to the fishers along the Palk Bay region and the Nagapattinam coasts, the Centre having banned the trade in the Gulf of Mannar Biosphere for ecological reasons. Encouraging Indian fishers in these waters to take to deep-sea fishing could help them diversify in a big way from the controversial Sri Lankan waters, where they have been complaining of constant harassment by the Navy from that country.
More importantly, deep-sea fishing, as the success story elsewhere in the country and more so in the rest of the world would show, is the fishing of the future, and has the potential to change the lives and lifestyle of the fishing community for the better, beyond all pales of recognition. Given the complexities involved, a pilot project on these lines, with focussed funding and attendant additional facilities, including the deployment of mother-ships, cold storages along the coast and marketing facilities on shore and also for mid-sea transfers all could go a long way in this regard. Once tested and deployed elsewhere, not just in other coasts of Tamil Nadu but all along the 7,500-km long Indian coast, it would have beneficial consequences not only for the fish trade and fishers lives but also for the nation’s economy as a whole.
With the use of computers and GPS systems, there are fishing boats in the State and elsewhere in the country that spot catch areas by the day. Mobile phones in the coastal, fish-rich Kerala State became popular a decade and more ago, mainly through fishers’ use in the high seas, to stay in touch with the shore and other boats, in terms of safety in seas, locating and sharing catch-area information, and fixing prices before the catch reaches the shore. Tamil Nadu fishers have been following the practice, for equally long terms, with mid-sea transactions being sealed without the wholesale buyer on the coast exactly having set his eyes on the catch. The trade thus depends also on traditions and trust.
Introduction of mother-ships, parked in mid-seas for the fishers to store/deposit their catch, or sell them on the spot, based on prices fixed on land, and for their occasional rest and recuperation, particularly in sudden storms, would go a long way, all around. The initiative, inputs and initial funding and personnel will have to come from the Governments, both at the Centre and in the States. Fishing labs could be attached to some or all of those mother-ships, for testing the quality and quantity of the catch available in the neighbourhood waters, and takes scientific steps to improve yields in the seasons and years to come. More importantly, the lucrative tuna business being dependent on the long course that the fish variety takes in travelling long distances across the seas, mother-ships in the deep-seas with periodic change of crews in dependent boats could make a difference. Tamil Nadu may stand to benefit immensely from such a combined effort.
Troubled waters, still
Though the State Government’s initiative would apply to all fishers across Tamil Nadu’s 1050-km long coastline, its effectiveness would be immediately felt in the troubled waters of the Palk Bay, where a clash of catch-based interests with Sri Lankan fishers have evolved into a sensitive political and diplomatic issue between the two peoples and the two Governments. Constant allegations of Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) attacks on Indian fishers, including killings, have been accompanied by equally vehement refusals from the other side. No end seems to be in sight to this vexatious issue.
Simultaneously, the ‘fishing issue’ also involves the Indian fishers crossing over the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) into Sri Lankan waters, involving questions of sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is often countered by arguments based on ‘traditional fishing rights’ of the Tamil Nadu fishers, which have been purportedly ‘compromised’ by laws of Governments as against the laws of nature – that fish goes where they fish and fishers go where the fish goes.
Arguments on both sides have often been accompanied by ‘international best practices’. In this case, there have been countries in the neighbourhood and afar that have entered into agreements and enforced them effectively in permitting ‘licensed fishing’ in each other’s waters, but both sides jealously ensuring against violations of the agreement and over-exploitation by each other’s fishers. This has included cutting down on the agreed quotas, confiscating the catch and dumping them in the seas, quality-control, etc. There is a precedent in the India-Sri Lanka case. The 1976 bilateral maritime boundary agreement, in which positive reference was made to the 1974 Katchchativu accord, India allowed Sri Lankan fishers to engage in their trade in the southern Wadge Bank for a three year period. It was agreed that six Sri Lankan vessels would be licensed to catch 2,000 tonnes of fish each year, followed by a further five-year ‘grace period’, when New Delhi would sell 2,000 tonnes each year at a mutually-agreed price.
The 1976 agreement, which set a precedent for peaceful accord between nations on maritime boundary issues even as they were negotiating the UNCLOs, meant that the tiny islet of Katchchativu would fall within the Sri Lankan territory as per the 1974 agreement, and the southern Wadge Bank within Indian territorial waters. While the Tamil Nadu Government has since pleaded itself in a private petition filed by Chief Minister Jayalalithaa in her personal and political capacity when she was not in office for India re-taking Katchchativu, citing constitutional issues, even a favourable verdict – if at all — in the matter would have no international consequences.
The return of the Sri Lankan Tamil fishers to the sea after the conclusion of the decades-old ‘ethnic war’ in that country has brought them face to face with the reality of the ‘domineering presence’ of their Tamil Nadu counterparts, who had faced little or no restriction in the former’s traditional waters during the war years. They have constantly protested the high number of Indian vessels in their waters, and the latter resorting to ‘unconventional’ fishing practices, banned in their country and also enforced effectively, both for Tamil and Sinhalese-speaking fishers, alike.
Mutually-beneficial
The Sri Lankan Government all along, and the Sri Lankan Tamil fishers in the North and the East of the country since the conclusion of the war, have vehemently protested against the Tamil Nadu fishers deploying high-speed trawlers and ‘purse-seine’ nets, both of which destroy fish beds, young ones and eggs alike, as they had been proved to have done in the adjoining Indian waters, already. With constant and continuing encouragement from the Governments of Tamil Nadu, India and Sri Lanka, fishers’ representatives had entered into a mutually-beneficial agreement in 2010, including freedom for fishing for Tamil Nadu fishers in the Sri Lankan waters, with the express commitment that Indian fishers would not use banned equipment.
There has been no follow-up since to a low-profile review meeting in Colombo at the height of the heated campaign for the 2011 Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, which also witnessed a change of Government, then headed by DMK Chief Minister M Karunanidhi. While both national Governments have been for the fishers’ to come to a mutually-agreeable and enforceable arrangement as the first step, the periodic Joint Working Group (JWG) meeting, with Tamil Nadu representation, at Colombo in mid-January 2013, also promised to take it forward.
However, there has been no visible improvement on the ground since, purportedly owing to a lack of interest in and initiative by the Tamil Nadu Government, even as the State and the Government have been constantly taking up the issue of ‘SLN attacks’ with the Centre. In the light of the ‘Enrica Lesie’ ship case, involving the arrest of two Italian Marines for killing Indian fishers from the neighbouring State of Kerala, that too within Indian territorial waters, the Tamil Nadu Assembly, at the instance of the Jayalalithaa Government, passed a unanimous resolution recently, for the Centre to declare such attacks as ‘acts of aggression’ (with predictable bilateral consequences).
Earlier, the DMK Opposition, which was a part of the Manmohan Singh Government at the Centre when the ‘Enrica Lesie’ episode occurred, revved up the political temperature by arguing why the latter had double-standards between fishers from Tamil Nadu and Kerala. However, protests of both kinds need to be read in the context of the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court ruling only months earlier with constant reference to the submissions of the Coast Guard (representing all departments and agencies of the Centre) and the State Government, on ensuring that the Tamil Nadu fishers did not cross the IMBL with Sri Lanka and what all precautionary measures were in places and what more was being done, or needed doing.
In the first of its kind in recent years, after a mid-sea episode in the past weeks, the Tamil Nadu fishers had alleged that the SLN personnel had attacked them in the Indian water. They had ended almost overnight after visiting Indian Navy brass in the southern coastal towns declared that such charges, if proved, would mean that the Sri Lanka Navy was challenging the Indian Navy – and hence, needed to be taken more seriously than thought of.
In a happy coincidence of sorts, in a more recent incident, Tamil Nadu fishers caught in mid-sea alerted their men on land over mobile phone, and the Indian Coast Guard could effectively intervene, and is reportedly to have brought the episode to a happy ending. Read in the context of the Coast Guard’s submission in the Madurai High Court Bench that no fisher had ever alerted them in any way over the past decades about mid-sea harassment by the SLN, despite the presence of GPS (to locate their position), vast use of mobile phones and other communication equipment on many boats. Invariably thus far, the Tamil Nadu fishers had held that the SLN personnel would throw their communication equipment overboard, to begin with.
Drowned in ‘ethnic issue’?
It is possible, if not probable, that elements in Tamil Nadu may be concerned about the possibilities of further negotiations between the fishers from Sri Lanka’s Tamil areas and those from Tamil Nadu getting entangled in the larger ‘ethnic issue’ in the island-nation. As the past year has shown, competitive pan-Tamil voice in Tamil Nadu over the ‘ethnic issue’ in Sri Lanka has drowned those from within that country. Any negotiations between fishers from across the Palk Bay could thus expose chinks in the collective armour, and could lead to avoidable political embarrassment, particularly in Tamil Nadu.
Contradictory linkages are being established between mid-sea attacks on Indian fishers and politics, based on the ‘ethnic issue’ in Sri Lanka, in Tamil Nadu and now the international arena, starting with the UNHRC, Geneva. On the Indian side of the Palk Strait, it is often attributed to motivated attacks by Sri Lankan Navy personnel or at least by ‘rouge elements’ from within. On the other side, the linkage used to be to the LTTE during the war years, and to the ‘rump LTTE’ since, as an effort at embarrassing bilateral relations at the wrong hour.
The 2011 fishers’ agreement had allocated 72 ‘fishing days’ for those on the Indian side of the Palk Strait, with a ban on their use vessels and equipment banned in Sri Lanka, and limiting their activities to an area not close to the shallow waters of Sri Lanka. There have been differences within the Sri Lankan Government and even among the fishers in that country to the agreement, which was signed in the presence of two officials of the island-Government
A new situation may emerge later this year if the Sri Lankan Government stuck to President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s promise of holding the Tamil-majority Northern Provincial Council elections by September this year. The chances of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), seeking a negotiated settlement to the ‘ethnic issue’, winning the elections and forming an administration, even if with truncated powers under the Thirteenth Amendment of the Sri Lankan Constitution, are high. Even otherwise, it will be a Tamil-led administration, seeking to address the concerns of the local Tamils, including fishers, in the post-war milieu.
Whoever comes to elected power in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province and whenever, ‘competitive regional politics’ of the kind familiar to and dominating the Tamil Nadu scenario looks inevitable. A TNA administration in particular would come under constant and increasing pressure from the Tamil political Opposition in the Province, which is already in the forefront of fishers-related issues and politics in the North.
A stage may not then be far off when a TNA administration, if that became a reality, would be attacked as willingly ‘compromising’ the livelihood concerns of the fishing community, which had nowhere else to go, against the ‘utopian demands’ of the Jaffna townspeople, most of whom now form the backbone of the ‘rump LTTE Diaspora’. The TNA, and the pre-war Tamil moderate polity, had not escaped similar charges in relation to other sections of the Northern Tamil community, and the rest of the Sri Lankan Tamil community in the past.
It is not unlikely that mid-sea episodes involving the fishers from the two countries on the one hand, and the SLN on the side of the Sri Lankan Tamil fishers on the other but within the Sri Lankan territorial waters, could heat up the run-up to the Provincial Council polls, after all. Escalated to new heights during the run-up to the UNHRC’s September session, where again Sri Lanka will be an issue, it could embarrass the Tamil Nadu parties more than they may understand – particularly among the Sri Lankan Tamil constituency in that country’s North – which they say, they are fighting for.
Such a situation could only complicate matters for the Tamil Nadu fishers, even more than already, if a negotiated solution is not found, early on! A delayed settlement to the fishing issue could thus also complicate problems for the Tamils of Sri Lanka, who would be requiring Tamil Nadu’s collective sympathy and constructive support even more in the months, if not years, ahead. Encouragement for deep-sea fishing coupled with an interim working arrangement with Sri Lanka and Sri Lankan Tamil fishers may be the way out, and for good, if ‘mid-sea harassment’ of the Tamil Nadu fishers have to end, and for good. Other methods do not hold any promise – at best, they are only ‘holding operations’, nothing more!
(The writer is a Senior Fellow at Observer Research Foundation)