Vadhavan fisherfolk: nets in troubled waters

The Arabian Sea is pushing inland again, swallowing the rippled sandbars and shallow channels of the Dahanu creek in Palghar district. Amita Tandel has hardly had any sleep. She waits for the time of the high tide, often setting an alarm to wake her up. Wearing a battery-powered headlight on her forehead, slinging a 10-15-kilogram net on her shoulder, she walks in the dark hours past midnight. About 400 metres towards the creek where another woman is waiting for her. “It is years of experience that teaches us to read the phases of the moon. It tells us the time of high and low tides,” she says.

“In our community, children grow up watching their parents fish. My father used to take me along when I was about 15. He taught me about the tides, the moon and the place where the fish move in the creek.” At 60, Amita has spent nearly five decades reading the tides the way her father did.

Once at the edge of the creek she and the other woman untangle and spread the 100x20 feet net. Soon they will hold it from either end and enter the sea, walking at some 30 feet distance from each other, dipping and dragging the net through the water, feeling rather than seeing what it catches.

“At night you cannot see what is beneath your feet. Aamchya kapalala battery aaste. Fakt laaitchya signalvar chaltaat [We wear battery lamps on our foreheads. The flickering light from those is the only thing that helps us coordinate]. There are strong waves and one mistake can make you lose your balance. It is never safe here. Sometimes we are neck-deep in water. We keep working because if we return without fish, there is no money for the day.” Amita is often inside the waters for more than four hours, until the weight in her hands seems promising enough.

Other men and women like her who don’t have a boat go hand fishing in this roughly 20-kilometre-long creek, just a few metres away from Varor village in the Dahanu taluka. It is part of the intertidal zone, exposed during low tide and submerged as the sea returns. “If I don’t go to the sea, what will we eat?” Amita asks.

That’s a question that haunts her more often these days with the coming of a massive infrastructure plan for Vadhavan port, with its 17,471-hectares spread across this very intertidal zone. The public-private partnership between the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority (JNPA) and Maharashtra Maritime Board (MMB) is to result in India's 13th major port. It will be the largest container project built on an offshore artificial island, reclaiming 1,448 hectares of the Arabian Sea. It is also going to be one of the deepest ports in the world to handle ultra-large cargo ships.

According to present estimates, the first phase of the project is to be completed in 2029 and the second by 2037. This project worth Rs. 76,220-crore promises to create more than 10 lakh direct and indirect jobs and offer compensation and skill development for the fishing community.

The Maharashtra government has reiterated the promise. The state says that through rehabilitation, skill training, ITI upgradation and a dedicated fisheries institute, it is committed to ensuring that “our fishermen, our youth, are not just witnesses to this progress but its primary beneficiaries.”

The locals are doubtful. "Look at the JNPT port, not a single member of the fishing families has received any job after the project. They have been fighting in the court for jobs and compensation. This is the case in all the mega projects," says 45-year-old Vijay Vinde, a fisherman with a boat.

"Our children are already labouring in factories in the Boisar industrial area. But they also know fishing. Food prices are so high, oil is unaffordable. Vegetables are expensive for us. Whatever we earn from the sea is what keeps the kitchens running,” says Amita.

“Some days we get 200 to 300 rupees, some days even less, but samudrane mala maaze baayipan dile, mukt kela [it is this sea that gives me my womanhood. It has got me freedom].” After two marriages to alcoholic men, Amita finally raised her son all on her own, relying just on hand fishing for an income.

“I have seen this sea from my childhood. I used to play, swim, and catch crabs here with other village kids. In those days my parents and grandparents would wake up in middle of the night. They gave me this life skill of hand fishing.”

The question of the access to the creek is most important for many hand fishers like Amita, as is the change in the marine ecosystem that a project is certain to bring. Her own understanding of the coastal ecology is rooted in the lived experience of generations. As she puts it, “Samudrat sagal ekmekanvar jagat. Hirav shewal ahe, tyavar chote jeev jagtaat, tyana mase khataat, mase astil tr amhi jagato. [Every other thing in the sea depends on another. There are the green algae, small creatures survive on it, fish feed on those small creatures. And we are the ones who survive on the fish].”

“Ola khali gel ki samudrach pot disat. Khekade distaat, shimpale distaat, lahan mase distaat. Hech pudhe mothe hotaat. Hee tyanchi vadhayachi jaga aahe. [When the tide recedes, you can see the belly of the sea. You can see the crabs, shells, small fish. This is where they grow before moving deeper into the sea]. We don't need to be taught where the fish are born. We see it every day – where the eggs are, where the young fish move, where the crabs emerge from. The sea itself teaches us everything.” Amita speaks with ease about the rocky breeding stretches, known as Shankodhar point.

This is what Dahanu-based researcher Bhushan Bhoir calls “a layered marine ecosystem.” It is shaped by rocky outcrops, intertidal mudflats, creeks, mangroves and the mixing of freshwater from rivers like the Vaitarna with the Arabian Sea. “Fresh water from river softens the salinity. Therefore, the sweet water found just a few feet below the ground here creates brackish conditions that support plankton and fish in abundance,” he says.

It is this fragile marine cycle that sustains both biodiversity and the fishing economy along the Dahanu coast that the Vadhavan port will alter. This, with reclamation and land filling of 1,448 hectares in the intertidal zone, along with a 10.14-kilometre-long breakwater wall.

A CSIR–National Institute of Oceanography report points to an ‘inevitable’ destruction that large-scale reclamation and dredging will cause. One that could disturb fish breeding cycles, alter marine food chains and affect the movement of marine species along the coast.

Amita and others in the fishing communities of Dahanu do not see these as abstract ecological concerns. The intertidal coast is where generations have earned a living from hand fishing. The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report claims that nearly 20,809 fisherfolk from 5,333 households depend on this ecologically rich zone for survival. However, it is hard to say if the smaller hand fishers like Amita are counted at all in the EIA study.

“No officer came to us hand fishers and asked us what we do. They must have spoken to fishermen with boats,” Amita clarifies. Vadhavan Bunder Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti confirms there could be more than 200 hand fishers around these Dahanu villages. “But with the port, all in the community are going to lose the sea area for fishing. So we just don’t want this port here,” says Amita.

The project’s road and rail corridors, spread across 571 out of a total of 17,471 hectares, are expected to pass through 16 villages including Varor, Agar, Narpad and Tarapore. While compensation is promised for acquired land and rehabilitation for the displaced, the sea itself falls outside conventional compensation frameworks.

And for fishing communities that is where the real loss lies. “Aamchi sheti samudhrach. Aata samudracha kahi saatbaara aahe ka [Our farm is the sea. Do you have a satbaara for the sea or what]?” asks the indignant Vijay.

“We have lived here for generations. This is where ghol fish and several species of lobsters live, which get sold at expensive prices. Who is this port for? For big industrialists. Who will come here? Big businessmen. And this garib janata will be pushed aside,” he says.

Even the EIA report acknowledges that the port will restrict access to existing fishing grounds. It identifies fishing households, boat owners, crew members and labourers on the boats among the affected groups eligible for one-time cash compensation and temporary income support. Those who fish without boats like Amita do not fall anywhere within the eligibility criteria for compensation. No wonder Amita has no idea about any promised compensation.

The struggle of Dahanu's fishers and farmers over this coastline started three and a half decades ago in the 1990s, when they first opposed the plans for a port. Their long campaign resulted in a Supreme Court intervention and the formation of a special environmental authority.

“We went to the Supreme Court in 1996. And the Dahanu Taluka Environment Protection Authority (DTEPA) was formed under the chairmanship of Justice C.S. Dharmadhikari,” says Narayan Patil, 70, president of the Vadhavan Bunder Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti. “Later, our case opposing the port was taken to the newly formed authority. And after years of dragging it on, finally, in 1998, the permission for developing the port was denied permanently.” Today, 25 years down the line, if the Vadhavan port's approval has come, it is not because local opposition has withered, but because the rules around the project were changed.

“After 2014, the government itself kept dismantling the law, systematically. Long standing members of the DTEPA [appointed by the Supreme Court] were replaced in 2023. And ironically, the project received approval from the same authority [which once denied it permanently],” says Narayan Patil. After that, in February 2024, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change granted environmental clearance to the project.

The EIA report 2023, however, admits that construction of the port will create an adverse impact on the Vadhavan shoreline where fishers have a good catch and practice lobster culture practices. The proposed solution of the government is ‘livelihood diversification’ — including training in open sea cage culture for young fishers.

“Itha ha port aala, aami kay karaycha, pinjryaat macchi kasha pakadnar, Samudra aapanhun tayaar karato sagal [Now what are we to do if the port comes here? How do you fish with a cage? The sea readies the catch for us, naturally,” says Kalpesh Akre, 32, one of those young fishermen for whom this unconventional fishing is being planned. He has just returned from the sea in the evening after spending some six hours fishing. Body drenched in sea water, clothes covered in sand, a coiled fishing net in one hand and a long wooden pole in another, he shows little faith in cage fishing.

In the last few days the port construction has begun at full speed, beginning with the reclamation at sea, construction of roads. Ironically section 163 of Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Samhita has been invoked within 500 meters from the place of road construction to prevent any unlawful gatherings like villagers staging a protest. This restriction is to remain active till the month of September.

In a few days Kalpesh and Amita will return to hand fishing in the sea. While the coastline changes, the tides remain their only certainty. And in the middle of of the rising storm on the Vadhavan coast line Amita speaks longingly, “I want to buy a boat one day.”