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A year ago, Kriti Gogoi from Assam had never set foot on a boat. But this young man has become a senior among the non-Malayalis on the trawler, Vishnu, in about a year. He has been in Kerala for the last six years and worked in almost every sector from construction to the wood industry. But this is a job he enjoys. "We go far into the sea and drop nets and start pulling them all the way back. Sometimes, we get a huge catch and a good share of the profits" he says. Though there is no record of the exact number of migrant labourers employed by the sector, about 7,000 to 8,000 workers from Bengal, Assam and Odisha are said to be engaged as deck hands in the mechanised fishing sector. The skilled fishing tasks are still being handled by Malayalis and Tamils from the Kanyakumari district. There are over 20,000 workers in this sector working in nearly 1,600 mechanised boats, including trawlers, in the Ernakulam district. Another 4,000-odd men are working in over 500 motorised and non-motorised boats. Shortage of manpower has been cited as the main reason for employing migrant labour from north India and northeast. "Big boats with about 12-15 people employ 8 to 9 migrants. They learn fast and work hard. The only problem is that they don't know fishing, which is an art. But they learn fast," says Joseph, who has been in the industry for nearly three decades and works now at the harbour. While Kriti has become an expert in puling nets, his new friend Phulan Bokalial, who started going on the boat a few months ago, has started the learning process. "There's so much work. I am learning to separate different kinds of fishes," he says. With the ongoing central ban on trawling, which will be followed soon by the state ban, most of these migrant workers will go on leave to work elsewhere. "We will come back on July 31 after the ban is lifted. It's not profitable for owners to have so many men on board and, hence, we have to find other jobs," says Narayan Voda from Odisha. Joseph Xavier Kalappurakkal, general secretary of the Kerala State Mechanised Boat Operators Association, says that among all the non-Malayalis, the best and the most skilled ones come from Tamil Nadu, especially Kanyakumari and neighbouring areas. "The others learn, but seafaring skills come naturally or over years of training," he says.
Keywords
Kochi, India, South Asia, migrants, fishing, unorganised sector, trawling, ban, Malayali, Bengal, Assam, Odisha, mechanized fishing, Tamil, Ernakulam
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