Member of Parliament from Bhandara-Gondia Nana Patole will be leading a team of agitating fishermen to Mumbai as they have been invited by chief minister Devendra Fadnavis for talks on Wednesday (September 13). The small fishermen, who had set up cooperative societies and bid for leasing rights to fresh water reservoirs, tanks of irrigation dams or lakes, are up in arms as the new fishing policy declared recently has made life worse for them. These fishermen were fighting for better conditions, but instead the new policy brought in by the government has hiked lease rates four to six times. Moreover, it has put stringent conditions on the societies to compel them to invest in infrastructure like mechanized boats, deep freezers and vehicles. For instance, a society having lease on reservoir of 50 hectares has to invest Rs 25 lakh in a period of five years. For 1000 hectares, it is Rs 75 lakh. Fishermen argue that the idea is not feasible and they want the government to chip in. “When states like Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are proactively providing up to 75% subsidy for purchase of equipment including transport vans and two-wheelers to fishermen, Maharashtra is trying to fleece the poor fishermen who are unable to eke out a living,” said Mannu Datta, an activist fighting for fishermen’s rights. Datta’s public interest litigation is also pending before the high court and next hearing is fixed for Wednesday. This time, state fisheries commissioner is expected to be present for the hearing. “Centre had, in 12th Plan period, established a corpus of Rs4,300 crore for developing fisheries business. Of this, Rs1,200 crore was earmarked for fresh water reservoir fishing. But sadly, state could get barely Rs 38 crore of that and that too went to the state-run Maharashtra Fishing Development Corporation which is defunct and loss making unit.