It normally is the weather that reins in the trawlers and fishermen from venturing out to sea after the monsoon ban on mechanised fishing has been lifted, but this year it has not been the weather that has dampened the inaugural fishing party. With the sun shining down, hardly any rain and the sea much calmer than it usually is at this time of the year, trawler owners who would have gladly launched their craft into the sea were forced to keep their vessels anchored at the jetties as the workers had not returned from their long holiday in their home State. While the trawler workers do delay returning to work every year, this year the fishing season is expected to pick up only around the middle of August, when the labourers are expected to return. The fact that just a handful of trawlers left the jetties of Malim, Cutbona, Vasco and Chapora, underlines just how dependent the fishing sector in Goa is on workers from other States, mainly Orissa and Karnataka. But does Goa treat these labourers employed in the fishing sector well? The facilities that these workers who bring the fish to the Goan dining table are provided should make the State feel ashamed. Take the sanitation conditions for instance, where trawler owners at Cutbona admit that the workers have been provided open air bathing facilities and that since the labourers are out at sea most of the time, they do their ablutions while out at sea, and this is likely to continue until Cutbona gets the 50-seat toilet that has been commissioned and is being constructed. Cutbona has the main fishing jetty in South Goa apart from Khareawado, in Vasco, and if such are the conditions here, those at the other jetties could only be worse. For, it is not just the fishermen and workers at Cutbona that are looking for sanitation facilities, but those at the other fishing jetties too. The conditions at the Kharewado jetty at Vasco are similar and here too there are demands for proper sanitation facilities and even drinking water. Such conditions cannot be acceptable and not providing them is a violation of the guidelines of the National Fisheries Department which makes it mandatory for all State Fisheries Department to ensure that these essentials are in place at the fishing jetties. Proper sanitation facilities and drinking water needs to be provided to the trawler workers at the jetty with urgency. And there’s more. Fish being a perishable item it needs to be preserved under controlled conditions, otherwise it can go bad in hours. Yet, trawler owners have complaints of basic infrastructure that has not been provided to them. Some of the main issues are of non-working or sub-standard ice plants at the jetties and insufficient jetty space that leads to delay in unloading the fish from the trawler and abject berthing facilities that lead to damages to the trawlers. Take for instance the jetty at Kharewado that has a length of 75 metres, when the maximum prescribed length of a trawler in Goa is 20 metres, and so leads to a queue system for loading and unloading, which is in practice at all the jetties in the State. The new fishing season has started, but there has been little or no change in the conditions for the industry. The fishing ban period, when the jetties remain deserted, would have been ideal to take up improvements, so that some facilities could have been given to the sector, at the start of the season. With this not taken up, the industry just has to go through another season with the available facilities, in the hope that the government will attend to their woes at the earliest.