Since the late 1980s, thousands of men from the coastal villages of Andhra Pradesh, India, have travelled to Gujarat to work as skippers and crew on board mechanized fishing boats

Roshan, Manas

Aquatic Commons

56
SAMUDRA REPORT NO. 75
MIGRANT FISHERS
India
This article is by Manas Roshan 
(manas.roshan@gmail.com), independent 
researcher
On clear nights, when the fish are aplenty in the nets and he can take a break from steering, 
S Apparao thinks of his little house in 
Srikakulam on the northern coast of 
the south Indian state of Andhra 
Pradesh. Two lamps, one in the cabin 
and another on the mast of his 15-m 
boat, Parshuram, light up a tiny circle 
of the sea as it rolls under him. The 
first time he’d been out to sea as a boy, 
fishing near Visakhapatnam in his 
home state, this gentle motion that now 
rocks him to sleep had nearly thrown 
him overboard; he’d been sick for 
several hours afterwards. 
That day, he’d set out before dawn, 
and the sun had risen ahead of the boat. 
These days, he looks toward the land 
for the sunrise; on the small radio in 
the cabin, the voices of other fishermen 
in Marathi or Malayalam alert him to 
where he is on the Arabian Sea.
Since the late 1980s—when there 
were too many fishermen and too 
few fish in the water—thousands of 
men from Andhra Pradesh’s coastal 
districts of Srikakulam, Vizianagaram 
and Visakhapatnam, have travelled to 
the busy fishing harbours of Gujarat, 
working as tandels (skippers) and 
khalasis (crewmen) on mechanized 
fishing boats owned by local kharwa 
merchants. Only a fraction of Gujaratis 
eat fish but in the 1960s the state’s 
enterprising sea-faring castes had 
spotted the opportunity early and 
shifted from traditional maritime 
trade—which was losing out to 
modern shipping—and moved into 
fishing. Today, Gujarat’s boats account 
for a quarter of the country’s marine 
fish catch and over 8,000 registered 
boats pass through the state’s busiest 
harbour, Veraval, alone.  
Over the years, deep-sea fishermen 
from Andhra Pradesh have replaced 
those from Valsad and Kerala as 
workers on the boats. Though there is 
no official count, anecdotal estimates 
put the number of migrants at 25,000 
every season. They earn up to three 
times as much in Gujarat as they do 
fishing in small traditional canoes 
back home. A tandel like Apparao, with 
over 10 years of experience, makes Rs 
21,000 every month and a khalasi is 
paid about half that sum (one US$ was 
equal to Rs. 68 in December 2016). 
The highlight, they said, is the 
steady salary, paid in a lumpsum at 
the start of the fishing season. “Fishing 
is a gamble,” Apparao told me in 
July, standing outside his home in 
Srikurmam Machilesam village. “You 
don’t know if you’ll catch anything on 
a given day.” Apparao himself only 
studied till the fifth grade but he said 
that most of the migrants over 40 had 
never gone to school. After nearly a 
decade in Gujarat, Apparao was able to 
rebuild his mud house with brick and 
cement, and aims to complete another 
floor for his son by next year. 
Punishing work
In Gujarat, the money is steady but the 
work is punishing: an average fishing 
trip is nearly 20 days long and the 
men—nine to a cabin the length of a 
small car—have no steady work and 
rest hours. The hunt for a big catch 
takes them as far south as Karnataka 
and Kerala, which doesn’t win them 
any friends among local fishermen. 
Following Fish
Since the late 1980s, thousands of men from the coastal villages of Andhra Pradesh, India, 
have travelled to Gujarat to work as skippers and crew on board mechanized fi shing boats
Today, Gujarat’s boats account for a quarter of the 
country’s marine fi sh catch and over 8,000 registered 
boats pass through the state’s busiest harbour, 
Veraval, alone.
JANUARY 2017
57
“We’re in trouble if we ever run out of 
fuel in these areas,” said M Sandiyya, 
a khalasi also from Machilesam. “The 
local fishermen don’t allow us to dock 
our boats on shore and sometimes 
they even confiscate our catch.” 
Back at the Veraval harbour, the 
boats dock for just a day or two to 
restock fuel, ice and rations. During the 
eight months they spend in Gujarat, the 
men wake up every morning on a boat.
Veraval lies three hours south of 
Porbandar on Gujarat’s 1,600-km-long 
coastline. On streets that smell of fish 
and damp wood, almost everybody is 
employed in the fishing industry, but 
the town is better known on Gujarat’s 
cultural map for a few shabby hotels 
that house pilgrims to the Somnath 
temple 7 km away. Once every week, 
the Dwarka Express travels 52 hours 
and nearly 3,000 km from Puri—
mostly ferrying migrant workers 
from Odisha and Andhra Pradesh to 
industrial centres in Gujarat—stopping 
at the Veraval railway station to drop 
off fishermen like Apparao. But in 
earlier times the port saw visitors 
from  other places than Srikakulam. 
It’s now forgotten history to most of 
its residents, but for a few old Muslim 
sailors, that its merchants traded in 
textiles, dates and—even earlier—in 
horses, from West Asia and the Arabian 
Peninsula.
A few old merchant buildings 
crumbling in the sea air—one houses 
the Customs Department—hint at 
this history. But the Gujarati business 
classes are not the nostalgic kind; 
there’s little time for anything but work 
and the aartis at the famous temple 
next door.  Most conversations begin 
with the salutation “Jai Somnath”, 
even among the Andhra fishermen 
when they’re in Veraval. The closest 
movie theatre is nearly two hours 
away in Junagadh. (Srikakulam has at 
least seven theatres, all packed through 
the day.) In most cabins on the boats, 
the tiny 10-inch television-cum-DVD-
player is equipment as essential to 
the men as Garmin GPS systems or 
fish-finders.  
Besides being the country’s biggest 
fishing harbour, the town has a thriving 
boat-manufacturing industry, a large 
number of ice factories and over 100 
fish-processing units, most of which 
export to Europe and China. One such 
M I G R A N T  F I S H E R S
NIKHIL ROSHAN
Workers pack fi sh into crates to be unloaded from the fi shing craft as it returns to the Veraval harbour, Gujarat, India. The boats dock for 
just a day or two to restock fuel, ice and rations. During the eight months they spend in Gujarat, the men wake up every morning on a boat
58
SAMUDRA REPORT NO. 75
unit is managed by Kenny Thomas, 
whose company Jinny Marine is one 
of the larger exporters approved by 
the European Union (EU). Inside 
its sterilized factory, over 300 local 
women clean, sort and pack squid and 
shrimp into neat, impeccably labelled 
containers headed for supermarkets 
in Spain and Portugal. “Women are 
preferred because they can do this sort 
of work faster and more efficiently,” 
said Thomas. Nimble hands, he 
explained with a shrug, for customers 
that wouldn’t want any grazed 
calamari on their plates.
Thomas, though, is one of the 
responsible employers in a more 
regulated arm of the industry. Kenny’s 
father, K M Thomas, arrived in 
Bharuch as a fisheries officer in 1963 
and was instrumental in introducing 
mechanized fishing in the area. He 
later became a fisherman and went 
into the export business himself. 
Jinny Marine has fair working 
conditions and even hostels for its 
migrant workers; labour inspectors 
and EU norms ensure greater labour 
protection in the processing units than 
on the boats.
Srikakulam is a bustling coastal 
town nearly three hours northeast 
of Vishakhapatnam. There, I met 
Mylapalli Trinada Rao, who has tried 
to draw the government’s attention 
to a darker side of the migrant’s 
experience. Last year, Rao, a stocky, 
affable director of the state Fishermen 
Co-operative’s Federation (APCOF), 
wrote to Prime Minister with a list 
of over 60 names, of fishermen from 
the district who had drowned in 
Gujarat, Goa and Odisha since 1990. 
The number may not seem alarming 
in a country where industrial 
accidents and farmer suicides are all 
too common, but Rao pointed out 
that not one body has been returned 
to the families, who have also not got 
the compensation promised by state 
laws. He didn’t expect a reply from 
the Government but claimed that 
there’s been no action from the 
Fisheries Departments of any state. 
In the Srikakulam villages I visited, 
some of the men spoke a little Hindi 
and Gujarati but the women only 
Telugu, and they’d never talked to 
their husbands’ employers in Veraval. 
Apparao remembered the time when 
one of his crewmen fell into the sea 
and was later found tangled in the 
nets. “It was too late when we brought 
him up. We packed the body with ice 
in the fish hold and turned back 
towards Veraval,” he said. But in that 
instance, the seth sent the body back 
to the village with another khalasi. 
Apparao’s seth, Tulsibhai Gohel, 
is president of Veraval’s boat owners 
association, the Kharva Sanyukta 
Machhimar Boat Association. It’s the 
only grouping resembling a union but 
designed to service capital rather than 
labour. Gohel is a lean, light-eyed and 
respected president who, like several 
investors in the trade, owns about half 
a dozen boats. Apparao said his seth 
is a good man, one of the few who 
gives his crew a bonus every year and 
doesn’t grudge when they return with 
a meagre catch. 
When I met him in Veraval in July, 
Gohel was finishing with a meeting 
with local officials to launch a Swachh 
Bharat (clean India) drive at the boat 
jetty. Dressed in a formal shirt and 
derby leather shoes, he was driven 
in his Toyota Innova to a modest 
association office, where, seated on a 
faded cushion on the floor, he oversaw 
the settlement of a few minor disputes. 
There was no mention of the workers 
in the matters that came up for 
discussion. Later, I asked Gohel how 
he dealt with cases of men drowning 
at sea. “There are very few because 
we don’t let the men carry alcohol on 
the boats,” he assured me. “All the 
accidents happen at the harbour when 
the boats are back. The men sometimes 
drink at night and fall into the water 
between the parked boats.”
Apparao agrees. (He stopped 
drinking a few years ago while on 
vacation in Srikakulam when he 
realized he was draining his savings.) 
...over 300 local women clean, sort and pack squid and 
shrimp into neat, impeccably labelled containers headed 
for supermarkets in Spain and Portugal.
I N D I A
JANUARY 2017
59But others in his village denied that 
the deaths were caused by drinking 
alone. “How many deaths can you 
have at the harbour?” asked Sandiyya. 
Marine fishing laws require all boats 
to be equipped with lifejackets, buoys 
and even portable toilets. Few boats 
in Veraval have lifejackets and for 
toilets the men sit precariously on the 
narrow bulwark, hold on to the 
rigging and point their backsides 
outward as the sea pitches the boat 
from side to side.
In Veraval, the sun-bleached 
marine police station sits on a deserted 
beach outside the town. Inside, a 
Constable, thumbed through a large 
register to find me the information 
on deaths at sea this year. There were 
two: a Bhagwan-bhai from a village 
in Valsad and Ramlu Badi of Dagalu 
in Srikakulam, as they appeared in 
the careless handwriting of a 
station officer. There was no other 
information; when I tried to find 
Dagalu in Srikakulam, I was told 
there’s no such village. 
One morning at the start of June, 
with the sun rising over Veraval 
bundur, the Parashuram set out on 
another long trip down the western 
coast, packed with over 7 tonnes of ice 
and enough ration for Apparao and 
M I G R A N T  F I S H E R S
NIKHIL ROSHAN
Migrant and local fi shers always work separately to avoid fi ghts. Labour inspectors and 
EU norms ensure greater labour protection in the processing units than on the boats
his crew. This was the last trip of 
the season. The radio crackled with 
greetings of “Jai Somnath” between 
the other boats sailing out, and 
through his cabin window Apparao 
could see the giant temple on the 
edge of the coastline. They’d pass 
Mumbai in a day or two. The sea was 
a lot rougher because of the strong 
monsoon winds, and the men held 
on to the ropes. Normally, they could 
stand on their feet as the sea tossed 
the boat and still haul in the nets 
and sort the fish, but the men hadn’t 
been home in eight months. No 
accidents on this last trip.
Apparao thought about the 
festivities in Machilesam the previous 
year. It had been his village’s turn to 
host the panchayat for the feast of 
their guardian deity, Polamamba-
mata. Most of the other tandels did 
nothing but eat and drink for the four 
months they were home. Not him; 
there were debts to settle and work 
that needed to be done on that first-
floor bedroom. He felt the engine 
roaring under him as he turned the 
boat southward in the direction of 
the other boats. The screen of his 
fish-finder glowed with numbers and 
broad strokes of blue. Somewhere in 
there was that prize catch.                      
icsf.net/en/occasional-papers/article/
EN/160-a-study-of-migr.html?limitstart=0
A Study of Migrant Fishers from 
Andhra Pradesh in the Gujarat 
Marine Fishing Industry
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Migrant fishers: following fish

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Migrant fishers: following fish

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