PM Modi’s upcoming visit to Sri Lanka and the issues of fishermen – Firstpost

The longstanding fishermen’s issue is expected to be a key topic of discussion during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Sri Lanka in April 2025. To address this issue, the Centre and State governments have acknowledged that deep-sea fishing is a more viable and sustainable alternative to the ‘destructive’ practice of bottom-trawling, which poses a threat to the livelihoods of Rameswaram fishermen.

A joint political effort at the highest level, combined with community education and awareness about cultural sensitivities, may be the solution to resolving this perennial dispute that has strained bilateral relations between India and Sri Lanka.

The Centre had originally identified deep-sea fishing as the way out, especially after Tamil fishers in the erstwhile war front in northern Sri Lanka began taking to the sea at the end of the first decade of the current century.

After initial hesitation and reservations, Tamil Nadu too adopted the Centre’s proposal in 2011. In the budget that year, the state government introduced subsidies for Rameswaram fishers to procure deep-sea vessels or convert their trawlers. The Centre formally joined later when PM Narendra Modi launched a Rs 1,500-crore subsidy scheme at a function in Rameswaram in 2017.

In between, the state government had effected an upward subsidy revision in 2013, after it was found that the ageing trawlers were unfit for a refit, and only new deep-sea vessels would serve the purpose.

This may also put paid to arguments over a ‘buy-back arrangement’, which even otherwise has failed in nations where it had been tried for this or other reasons. The question is if the fishers could be allowed to make some extra money by selling off their trawlers elsewhere across the coast after ensuring that they are not ploughed back into the Palk Strait.

Lacks momentum

A decade after the state subsidies began and seven years after the formal launch of the central scheme, the deep-sea fishing project has not picked up momentum. It is not for want of ideas but for want of trying out those ideas in a coordinated fashion. Customarily, successive Tamil Nadu Chief Ministers, including incumbent MK Stalin, have not shown adequate interest and initiative to implement the deep-sea fishing project at the ground level. This has meant unenthusiastic coordination and cooperation between state officials and central agencies equipped, if not tasked outright, to collaborate their efforts jointly in the matter.

In real terms, Tamil Nadu CMs, as is their wont, have mostly stopped with writing to the External Affairs Minister (EAM) of the day, seeking the Centre’s intervention, urging New Delhi to obtain the release of Indian fishers arrested by the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) and their impounded vessels early on. Unlike the late Jayalalithaa, who challenged the Centre at every turn, Chief Minister Stalin seems convinced that marine fishing being a subject under the Union List in the Constitution, the State Government should not say or do anything that could jeopardise the latter’s efforts in resolving the main problem.

There is another hitch. Despite the appointment of a separate fisheries minister with a cabinet rank in Modi 3.0, neither he nor his two ministers of state (MoS) seem to have taken any initiative in the matter. Before their time, L Murugan from Tamil Nadu, as MoS, was independently in charge of the newly created Fisheries Ministry under Modi 2.0 but again did not do much in this regard.

Incidentally, it was only towards the closing months of the UPA-2 that the larger issue went beyond the brief of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), as originally tasked. The Agriculture Ministry, under which the Fisheries Department came, was made the nodal agency for solving the dispute even as the MEA continued to handle TN requests for obtaining freedom for arrested fishers. This system continued under Modi 1.0.

Cultural issues

There is a second major hiccup to the implementation of the ambitious deep-sea fishing project. It is often argued that Rameswaram fishers, unlike their brethren along the rest of the Tamil Nadu coast, suffer from a ‘cultural issue’ as they are not conditioned to stay at sea for more than one night at a time. There is no historical evidence to support this claim beyond the past few decades.

Before Norwegians introduced mechanised fishing first and bottom-trawling to India under an UN scheme in the fifties, Rameswaram fishers, for generations, had travelled in traditional craft to the Sri Lankan Tamil coast over a few nights.

They then returned home after a few days’ stay there and a couple of nights again in the sea. Hence, it is wrong to assume that they are genetically unaccustomed to deep-sea fishing, hence their diffidence to do so now. It is another matter that Norway, which became the largest seafood exporter in the world by 2023, had proposed bottom-trawling for Third World nations after having reportedly banned the pernicious practice in its waters even at the time.

As for deep-sea fishing as an alternative for Rameswaram fishers, possible converts too were put off when ‘Cyclone Ockhi’ in 2017 claimed the lives of many deep-sea fishers in the southernmost Kanyakumari district and adjoining areas in neighbouring Kerala State. It was attributed to the absence of advance Met alert, despite the availability of on-board communication equipment. Today, every trawler and every deep-sea vessel along the Indian coast mostly has better communication, navigation and meteorological equipment on board.

Joint ownership

What is thus required under the circumstances is joint political direction at the topmost levels of the governments at the centre and in the state. This can help their respective officials and agencies that are otherwise sincere and serious to shake off residual reluctance and coordinate their information, infrastructure and efforts in all matters pertaining to deep-sea fishing.

This means that despite the intricacies of political administration in the country and the multiple manifestations of the inherent central-state issues, the prime minister and the chief minister have to take ownership of the joint project and discuss the parameters, which are then to be passed down the line for full-force implementation, joint reviews and decisions. The scheme has to be institutionalised at the highest level at the earliest if vagaries of electoral politics are not to interfere with the scheme, especially at the multi-phased implementation level, on a later day.

Less acknowledged

It is also important that the Centre-State coordination at the grassroots level should also include ‘community education’ that addresses ‘cultural issues’, if any, and also the fishers’ concerns over safety at sea. For instance, little is known and even less is acknowledged on record about the increasing interest of fisher children in those parts for acquiring formal education and high-paying jobs.

There are a high number of qualified engineers and management professionals, among others, who are gainfully employed in urban centres, in IT firms and such other industries. Like them and unlike their parental generation, their younger siblings, both boys and girls, too, have enrolled in better schools away from their fishing hamlets to be able to make a livelihood outside maritime fishing, which also comes with more risks than earlier.

In any meaningful effort to ‘educate’ the community, government agencies can consider using the good offices of these young men and women, who can then convince their older generations to prefer something less riskier than, and equally money-spinning as bottom-trawling. It is also true that many trawler owners come from this age group and education/economic background, at least on record, but those vessels are often operated by senior family members from an earlier generation.

In the interim, the state government, with its last-mile linkages through the local administration, can impress upon local fisher-hamlet panchayats to convince their community members. Over the medium and long terms, the state government can also take the ‘environmental message’, especially on bottom-trawling, to schoolchildren in those areas.

In the past, similar education on sound and air pollution caused by Diwali and Pongal festivities has had a salutary effect across the State. Commercial establishments too have been exploiting this medium, but under the cover of ‘social messaging’ and CSR projects.

No new ideas

According to some estimates, around 2,500 trawlers from the Rameswaram area fish in the Palk Strait. The Kachchatheevu Accords of 1974 and 1976 are constant political irritants with little or no practical consequence, as there are no commercially exploitable fish stocks in those waters. Also, whatever the IMBL that is drawn/redrawn using the ‘median line’ principle that was not followed under the two Accords, the Indian trawlers are bound to violate the same and will continue to face all the problems that they are facing. The only way out, thus, is to help them relocate.

At present, the Sri Lankan Tamil fishers are complaining, the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) are arresting ‘trespassers’ and impounding their vessels, and courts in the country’s Tamil North are handing down long jail terms and/or hefty fines to Indian fishers in their waters. Both the SLN and the nation’s courts are mandated by an old law after the Sri Lankan Parliament had unanimously amended it in 2017, originally at the behest of a Tamil MP.

There is still no appetite among Sri Lanka’s northern fishers for any compromise of any kind with the Indian counterparts on the issue of bottom-trawling. Their concerns about ‘livelihood issues’ and ‘sustainable fishing’ have a restricted meaning and application. It does not cover ‘sustainable fishing’ and ‘livelihood concerns’ from an Indian fishers’ angle. Instead, on both, the Indian fishers’ use of bottom trawlers and purse seine nets is a dampener for any working out a via media.

The Joint Working Group (JWG) of officials from the two countries, set up to find an amicable solution to the problem, has been meeting from time to time, repeating their known positions. Certainly, there are no new ideas for them to consider, discuss and debate.

Multi-pronged approach?

Internally in India, deep-sea fishing is the only known option and alternative. A multi-pronged approach to resolving the issue is also aired often. This includes some form of cooperative fishing between fishermen from the two countries and also other occupational options and opportunities for Rameswaram fishers and their family members. Each one of them has to be considered on merit and past experience to arrive at a balanced package, if any, over and above the mainstay deep-sea fishing.

Among them, early expectations that fishers from Nagapattinam, along the Rameswaram coast up north, would be gainfully employed in the public sector oil refinery, especially during its expansion phase, did not come through, whatever the reason. The one about the advisability of recruiting more from coastal communities into the Coast Guard or the State’s Coastal Police too has not materialised.

The third one, on promoting and propagating prawn farming and aquaculture, both at commercial levels, along the coastal villages across the country, took a huge hit after the Supreme Court struck down the very idea, citing environmental concerns, as far back as the mid-nineties. Other initiatives like encouragement for coastal fishers to take to ornamental fishing for sale cannot sustain too many of them. All of such projects anyway are capital-intensive. Still, the large number of fishing labourers who make a substantial income from either deep-sea fishing or bottom-trawling would stand to lose heavily.

Joint/coordinated patrolling

Though they are diffident to the idea of cooperative fishing mooted from across the Palk Strait, Sri Lankan Tamil fishers have often repeated their willingness to let their umbilical cord brethren from India to fish in their territorial waters. But that is so, if and only if the latter give up the use of bottom trawlers and purse seine nets that deny them their catch and also destroy their smaller vessels, nets and also fish habitats. However, it is for the Sri Lankan government, and not the Northern Tamil fishers, to take a final call in the matter. At this stage, if it came to that, New Delhi should use its good offices to find a middle path.

Through a news report recently, Sri Lankan fishers proposed joint patrolling to check against bottom-trawling, which is banned in Sri Lanka. New Delhi had reservations when the idea was first mooted by Colombo in the closing years of the ethnic war in Sri Lanka. However, the Indian Navy’s recent experiment on ‘coordinated patrolling’ with its Bangladesh counterpart was reportedly restricted to future cooperation only in matters of terrorism and other offences.

Incidentally, in a pending matter before the Indian Supreme Court, the Centre has claimed, and rightly so, that the Tamil Nadu Government did not have sweeping powers to ban purse seine nets, and it was limited to only the territorial waters of the state. The overall authority rested only with the Centre, the court was told.

In 2023, the Supreme Court had cleared the use of purse seine nets in another case but after laying down stringent conditions. How stringent its enforcement is unclear. Incidentally, a study by the Centre’s Fisheries Department had earlier upheld the practice, and for obvious reasons, to be operational inside the nation’s territorial waters and the EEZ. The case itself is posted for further hearing on April 26, 2025.

National plan

The Centre has since promised the Apex Court to come up with a national plan for the use of purse seine nets. By implication, if the Centre too has questioned the State Government’s authority in the matter, and rightly so, it has the added responsibility also to ensure that those nets and the trawlers that use them do not cross the IMBL into such other nation’s territorial waters. That responsibility alone cannot be sliced away and given to the State Government, which does not have the legal authority in the matter.

It means that deploying trawlers carrying purse seine nets per se is not an offence, but crossing the IMBL (alone) is – and under Sri Lankan law. It implies that verification, checks and stoppages can be undertaken at the entry point to the IMBL from the Indian side. The trespassing fishers often claimed that they were unable to locate the IMBL and that the SLN personnel had thrown their GPS equipment, gifted by the Centre for the purpose, too, into the sea along with their catch. They have no explanation when they are caught closer to the Sri Lankan coast, which they could see with plain eyes from their boats, miles away.

To the credit of the state governments across the country, including Tamil Nadu, they have successfully been implementing the annual marine fishing ban in their near seas to facilitate breeding. In Tamil Nadu, more recently, the state government successfully enforced a trawler ban along the coast of Chennai and Cuddalore, among shore cities, after the National Green Tribunal (NGT) took up the high incidence of Olive Ridley turtles in their breeding season.

Such instances go on to say how the state government can implement any ban of the kind, that too with the full cooperation of the local fishing communities, if it has the will and power. While the state government has been found to be lax, up to a point, the very fact that the centre alone has the authority to set the framework for the use of purse seine along the India-Sri Lanka IMBL but does not have the ground-level enforcement authorities only means that there has to be greater coordination and cooperation between the two.

All of it thus takes one back to the premise for the Centre and the State to work together, encouraging deep-sea fishing as a viable alternative to bottom-trawling and purse seine nets, with the PM and the CM taking the initiative jointly and the two governments working collectively at every step and at every turn. A workable solution in the form of deep-sea fishing is already on the table, and making it work on the ground is the way out, possibly the only way out.

Sri Lankan government leaders, including Fisheries Minister R Chandrasekar, a Tamil from the North, other senior leaders of the ruling JVP and opposition Tamil parliamentarians, apart from local fisher associations, have indicated their plans to discuss the issue of bottom-trawling with PM Modi when he visits the country next month. The only concession, for instance, comes from a Tamil MP, Selvam Adaikalanathan, with a strong fishermen constituency in northern Mannar district, who the other day declared in Parliament that whatever the dispute with their Indian brethren, they would not ‘sell out’ to China, as is being reported in the local media from time to time.

The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.