By IANS
Chennai : As many as 30,000 fishermen took to the streets in different parts of Tamil Nadu’s coastline Thursday, demanding that the central government give up its plans to dismantle the existing coastal laws and notify a new coastal land and water use policy.
Tamil Nadu has a 1,076 km coastline with a 0.19 million sq. km exclusive economic zone. It has 700,000 people in 591 villages of 13 coastal districts, dependent on fishing-related economy.
The protestors asked the government to abandon plans to put in place a new coastal zone management notification (the CZM Notification 2007) and reject the recommendations of the M.S. Swaminathan Committee, which reviewed the existing coastal regulation zone notification (CRZ).
This will dissolve the existing ‘no-construction’ laws along the coastline, the protestors said.
The protestors also demanded strict implementation of the CRZ notification, 1991 in its original form and asked the government to withdraw all the 19 amendments that, they said, “diluted the CRZ notification”. They also sought legal action against violators of the 1991 notification.
“The people to whom the coastal lands and fishing rights traditionally belong are calling upon the Indian government not to hand over our rights to the public and private sector industries,” said J. Kosimani of the Tamil Nadu Meenavar Munnetra Sangam.
“The CZM is anti people. The fisher-folk and other coastal communities call upon the government to halt all policies, laws and notifications that are causing destruction of coastal lands and natural resources,” Ossie Fernandes, leader of the Coastal Action Network, an umbrella organisation for several federations, told IANS.
“Our coasts are increasingly being targeted for destructive ‘development’ practices”, said A. Palasamy, leader of the Fishworkers’ Trade Union in Ramanathapuram.
“It also paves the way for displacement of fishing communities from their habitats and the areas they have traditionally used and fished. Especially the Swaminathan Committee has not, in its recommendations, recognised the traditional and customary rights of fishing communities to their habitat, highlighted in the 1991 notification.”
Fishing organisations and panchayat leaders warned that Thursday’s protest was the “beginning of a series of public actions calling upon industries, tourism and entertainment parks, infrastructure projects, defence projects, aquaculture and shrimp industries to quit the coast of India”.
In Chennai, 2,000 demonstrators distributed posters that said, “don’t sell our coast” and “today lakhs depend on fishing, tomorrow our rights will be snatched”.
On the tsunami-hit coasts of Nagapattinam and Tarangambadi, black flag rallies by 7,000 fisher-folk took place and the fishermen went on a daylong no-fishing protest.
In Ramanathapuram, Kanyakumari, Tirunelveli and Tuticorin, 20,000 fishermen protested with rallies beginning in churches and ending at the district administration offices.
Several thousand from the fishing communities on Puducherry and Karaikal coast protested at the state secretariat.
In the fishing hamlets of Mahabalipuram another 1,000 people protested. Nearly 5,000 fishermen in Cuddalore, Thanjavur and Thiruvarur coast also protested.
Coastal states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Orissa are also taking part in the nationwide protests.
India has an 8,118 km-long coastline and an exclusive economic zone of 2.02 million sq. km.