Who owns the sea? Should fisher folk starve to spur a tourism boom? What does the future hold for the fishing community, when in-sea sand mining is legitimised? Questions were fired as salvos against policy-makers on Monday, on the sidelines of the screening of K P Sasi’s documentary Resisting Coastal Invasion.
Sasi’s 52-minute film, in its first screening in Bangalore, traced the plight of fisher folk on the Kerala and Tamil Nadu coastlines, where their traditional rights have been taken over, with the administrative backing. Resisting Coastal Invasion deals with the fishing community’s problems in the backdrop of the M S Swaminathan Committee report, that in 2005 recommended the creation of Coastal Management Zones (CMZs) as against the Coastal Regulation Zones (CRZs) that were notified in 1991.
“The Committee recommended abolition of CRZs and mapping of ‘vulnerability zones’, a move that ran into widespread opposition. Under the guise of ‘management’ of coastlines, provisions have been made to allow even sand-mining in the sea,” the filmmaker told the audience, that also had viewers from the United States and Europe. As per the Committee’s recommendations, sand-mining into 12 nautical miles (22 km) of sea is allowed, he said.