“There were young people with degrees taking to purse seines because of the pay,” Karthi P said. “It was easy work.”
He was one of those. Having completed a diploma in mechanical engineering, Karthi, now 28 years old, got involved in purse-seine fishing in Nagapattinam, a seaside town on the Coromandel Coast of Tamil Nadu. Eventually, he also became a partner in Aayiram Kaliamman – a purse-seine fleet named after a local deity. But that was all before 2020, when purse-seine fishing was banned in the southern Indian state, leaving Karthi and many others like him fighting for their livelihoods.
Purse-seine nets – which can run one or two kilometres long and hang a few hundred metres deep underwater, with floats at the top and weights attached to the bottom – are used in the open ocean to catch schooling fish such as sardines and mackerel. Fish shoals are encircled with the net, like a curtain, before the bottom of it is quickly pulled together, creating a “purse” that prevents the fish from escaping. The method often sees several vessels working together – a typical fleet consists of a mechanised “queen” boat, sometimes equipped with nets of varying mesh sizes, and six to ten non-mechanised boats that help lay the net, herd and encircle shoals, and bring in the netted catch.
Nagapattinam district – situated at the northern end of the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka, and looking out on the Bay of Bengal to the east – is the epicentre of the battle over purse-seine fishing in Tamil Nadu. Less than a few kilometres apart in Nagapattinam town lie the hamlets of Nambiyar Nagar and Akkaraipettai. It was a tussle between them that led to the current ban.
Karthi belongs to Nambiyar Nagar, which once had ten purse-seine fleets. Akkaraipettai, just to the south, had none. But Akkaraipettai is home to more than two hundred trawlers – mechanised boats that catch fish by dragging a submerged net through deep water, or even along the seabed. And Akkaraipettai controls the Nagapattinam harbour, where the district’s fish trade is concentrated.
Trawl-boat catches are typically not as fresh as those from purse-seiners. Trawlers tend to spend days or weeks out at sea, accumulating and storing their catch before heading back to shore. Purse-seiners, with their massive nets, take in big catches at a go and quickly bring them ashore to auction centres. Trawl-boat owners complain that traders stop bidding for trawler catches whenever purse-seiners enter the harbour. With lots of fresh fish suddenly on offer, purse-seiners sell their catch off competitively, sometimes at reduced prices. In corralling single-species shoals, they also bring in less bycatch – non-target marine life caught unintentionally – leaving no need for significant sorting or cleaning of the catch before sale. Trawl boats, struggling for buyers, are often forced to sell cheap, or sometimes even dispose of their catches for almost nothing by giving them up to make fish oil, chicken feed or fertiliser inputs.
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