Even as regulations ease around the lockdown, several questions about the fate of Indian fishers remain unanswered. The problem with a crisis like COVID-19 is that the marginalised communities are the first to get hit and are almost always the worst-affected. When we discuss marginalisation in India, the complexity around caste, class, and occupation plays a giant role in determining who stands first in the line of fire. Fish workers, who are often overlooked even within the advocacy efforts of the marginal, have had to face hellish conditions during the course of the sudden lockdown, which is now in its 45th day, and counting.
On 22nd April 22, a 22-year-old fisher, K Raju, from Srikakulam district in Andhra Pradesh died of a panic attack aboard a boat off the coast of Gujarat. Up until that point, I’d never heard of a situation where someone died of a panic attack. Stranded on a boat with 11 other fishers stuck in unhygienic conditions, they were denied permission to dock their boat off-shore despite fish being declared an essential commodity. Raju was stressed for several days about his ill-placed situation in the pandemic, and died of a cardiac arrest induced by his panic.
Plight Of Fishers During The Lockdown
This is the second fisher death during the lockdown. Stranding has been one of the tensest consequences of a lockdown that gave the fisheries industry less than four hours to prepare. Fishers were not allowed to dock their boats or deboard, fearing risk of COVID-19 infection. Moreover, access to ration for fisher families was rigidly controlled under the circumstances. Fishers were asked to produce ration cards and Aadhaar cards to gain access to food. Considering that most fishers live wage to wage, they’re facing the hurdle of proper documentation – something the poorest in the country have no access to – on top of the already existing loss of livelihood due to the lockdown.
Women make up a large part of the workforce in the fisher community. In a lot of fisher families, the men travel to catch fish at sea, while women care for their families and act as vendors and local fisherwomen. Many fisherwomen catch crabs and local fish and try to sell them at the daily market. With the markets shut overnight, women fishers had two options; either to try and sell their scarce catch secretly and risk police violence, or risk starvation for themselves and their families. With the lockdown, there was little anybody could do within the family to ease their situation.
Meanwhile, fishers who had the somewhat better fortune of returning to land before the lockdown had another hurdle to overcome. The lockdown had declared ice a non-essential commodity. With no access to cold storage (storage facilities were shut) or transportation, fishers had no option but to dump their precious catch back into the sea. Nearly 15,000 tonnes of fish were dumped back into the sea; a colossal loss by any margin.
How Can We Help The Fisher Community
Grassroots organisations, advocacy groups, NGOs, and fishers’ unions including the National Fishworkers’ Forum have been working tirelessly to reduce the hurdles fisher families have been facing in order to gain access to food, sanitation, and healthcare during the lockdown. Dakshin Foundation, a non-profit organisation, has been working to amplify advocacy efforts, and working with fisher unions and the government to bring relief to fishers across coastal India. It is currently working on raising funds to provide relief kits to fisher families that will supply them with food and sanitation for a month.
The road to the fundraiser involved several weeks of identifying needs of fish workers, figuring out the ratio of stranded fish workers across coastal India, and identifying what form of help was required and in which areas. Dakshin Foundation put together several internal task forces that were handling crucial areas of responsibilities broadly spread across issues faced by stranded fish workers, food and health needs of fisher families, and the level of advocacy the fisher community needed. This fundraiser will focus on bringing relief to 3,300 fisher families in Tamil Nadu and Odisha.
Thanks to advocacy efforts by several groups and the media, nearly 4,000 fishers stranded in Gujarat are returning to Andhra Pradesh on buses organised by the State government. The easing of the lockdown will surely come as good news to the fishing community, but considerable damage has been done – social, physical, economic, and mental – that must be mitigated.
Unquestionably, the pandemic has raised several administrative challenges. Nobody could have actively prepared for the scale of this issue. But the 14 million people suffering to make ends meets makes us question our ability to protect the most vulnerable in our society. As we grapple to understand what lies ahead under the new normal raised by coronavirus, I hope we can spare a thought to those who brave the seas to feed India’s populace.
You can contribute to the fundraiser here.
About the author: Shruti Sunderraman is the Executive Editor of Current Conservation magazine. Her views are personal.