Moving fishermen off their lands: Safety considerations or dispossession?
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COMMENTS 
Fishermen in some tsunami-affected regions in south India are allegedly being forced to sign documents stating that they are relinquishing their land. If they don't, they are denied government relief material. The move is ostensibly aimed at shifting them out of the danger zone and further inland
Situated 45 km from Chennai, Karikattukuppam is a ghost town. Its streets are deserted (homes double-locked for security) and its residents unsure about their future. Villagers staying at a temporary shelter, a kilometre from the beach, continue to search for a safe permanent habitation. But it looks like it will be a long wait for the 300,000-odd fishermen in these coastal districts, with the state government failing to make known its plans.
N Varadarajan , a fisherman panchayat leader, says the government's plan-a-minute approach has sown seeds of distrust and confusion among the fisherfolk. "Every official we meet talks about a different rehabilitation plan. Some say we will be allowed to keep our old homes while new structures are built for us in a safe area. Others say we will only be given the new homes, while the chief minister announces something else. When will the housing policy be made final?"
On March 24, 2005 , the chief minister of Tamil Nadu announced in the legislative assembly that people living within 200 metres of the high-tide mark would not be forced to move out. While this may have put to rest any ambiguities caused by an intra-government circular advising district collectors to forcibly evict, if necessary, fishermen who lived within the 200-metre zone, the fishermen feel loose ends in the statement are liable to be misinterpreted.
Their fears are well founded. While announcing the policy in the assembly, the chief minister made it clear that any repairs done to homes within the 200 metre zone would have to be undertaken by the fisherfolk themselves without any assistance from the government.
Activists claim that although the government is trying to distance itself from the earlier order, this is an indirect way of forcibly relocating the fishermen. "Officials have gone on record accepting that 90% of the fishermen live within the 50-200 metre zone. If they are not given grants to repair their homes they will be forced to move out, given that they have not been fishing for three months and have lost most of their property in the tsunami," says V Srinivasan of Kattumaram Makkal Medai (a citizen's initiative for the tsunami-affected), an umbrella organisation of various voluntary organisations.
While this is in keeping with the World Bank's environmental and social management framework of the Emergency Tsunami Reconstruction Project (Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry), the Coastal Regulation Zone of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 protects the rights of customary livelihoods like fishing. But the framework makes clear that new buildings would not come up on the eastern side of the East Coast Road in CRZ-II (areas that have already been developed upto or close to the shoreline, especially in urban areas), where most of the fisher hamlets are. And in CRZ-III (rural areas with little planned development along the shore), no new construction will be permitted within 200 metres of the high-tide line. However, this would be relaxed if construction or reconstruction within the 200-500 metres pertains to traditional and customary rights.
Human rights activists such as those from the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) offer a different interpretation to the regulations. Says lawyer and PUCL national council member V Suresh: "The CRZ does not rule out dwelling units for those who have customary rights such as fishing anywhere between the high-tide line and 500 metres. This is tantamount to legal discrimination by the state."
Varadarajan and others from Karikattukuppam are very clear about wanting to move out of their homes to a safer location. "What about land acquisition for new homes? Our hamlet is sandwiched between the Buckingham canal and the sea. There is only one safe place but it belongs to the Indian Tourism Development Corporation. While the government announced all land identification for permanent homes would be done with the participation of village-level committees, none exist in our village," he says.
And what of their boats and nets? The new site that the fishermen have identified is 1 km inland, ruling out the safekeeping of such property in the village. Will the fishermen be allowed to keep their equipment in their old homes? "The chief minister's statement has nothing about keeping the old homes to store boats and nets. What will happen if our old homes are acquired and our lands sold off to private resorts? Access to our livelihood will be completely cut off if the government fails to protect our customary rights," says Ko Su Mani, general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Meenavar Munnetra Sangham.
The fishermen's fears stem from a 2003 decision by the government to build resorts along the coastline, with the participation of a Malaysian firm. The project was abandoned after fishing communities throughout the state came together to protest that it was in violation of the Coastal Regulation Zone Act.
In Puthu Kalpakkam village, oustees of the Kalpakkam Atomic Power Plant Project have only recently, in the last decade, managed to rebuild their homes. Repeated fires have ravaged the thatched structures they were forced to live in after being sent out of Kalpakkam in the 1960s. Now the homes, some built only within the last few years under the Indira Awas Yojana, are non-habitable; their foundations were washed away by the tsunami's powerful waves.
Brothers R Sathiyamurthy and R Marimuthu were able to build a pucca structure where their hut once stood a year ago. But they still have to pay back the Rs 1.5 lakh loan they received under the Indira Awas Yojana. They wonder if they will be able to afford the repairs if they stay behind. "There is no government poromboke (vacant) land available here. The private land belongs to a trust and its managers are already in litigation with the government after the Hindu religious and charitable endowment department took over the land," says Srinivasan of Kattumaram.
People housed in temporary shelters have already begun feeling the heat with hooligans threatening them to vacate land that could easily house residents of the five fishing hamlets of Nemilikuppam, Puthu Nemmili, Puthu Kalpakkam, Sulerikattu and Sallavankuppam.
With their trust in the government wearing thin, the fisherfolk are pinning their hopes on various civil society organisations (CSOs). From Kovalam to Mahabalipuram (35-70 km from Chennai), people are approaching CSOs for help in building new homes. P Gunasekaran, of the Nemilikuppam fishing panchayat, says his villagers are looking to the CSOs for assistance but the Memorandum of Understanding that CSOs have to enter into with the state government, in this particular project, is emphatic that land identification and acquisition would be carried out by district collectors and would not be a participatory process.
However, on the flip side, the government has decided to give joint ownership of homes to husbands and wives, and the sale of these houses would not be valid for upto 10 years. While this pioneering step will help safeguard the interests of women, several relevant changes need to be made to the property rights laws to include women in marital property matters.
Issues such as land acquisition and lack of a comprehensive resettlement policy have raised the hackles of donor agencies. Project Hope (that shot into the limelight when Bollywood actor Vivek Oberoi adopted the tsunami-hit village of Devanampattinam ) has shifted base to Karaikal in the neighbouring union territory of Pondicherry . The actor and his backers cited red-tapism and a leviathan bureaucracy as their reasons behind the shift.
But district collectors say they are fast-tracking land acquisition with the help of third-party negotiations. The absence of state-level policy in the National Policy on Resettlement and Rehabilitation is throwing a spanner in the rehabilitation works.
(Krithika Ramalingam is a Chennai-based journalist. She may be contacted at
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InfoChange News & Features, April 2005