Legalising coastal destruction
Fishermen oppose a new notification by the Environment Ministry that would open up the coast to industrial development. Their state governments agree, but the Centre and the World Bank are pushing ahead nonetheless. Kanchi Kohli reports.
24 November 2008 - On 4 November 2008, fishworkers from Andhra Pradesh, Tamilnadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Orissa and West Bengal reached New Delhi. For the next four days they addressed passers-by, met MPs, and addressed civil society and the media. They traveled long distances to the national capital to voice their displeasure at the corridors of power here, which are far removed from coastal realities and continue to propose policy and legal measures that impact the lives and livelihoods of fishing communities.
The fishworkers' agitation and advocacy efforts in Delhi included a list of demands -an appeal against the privatisation of marine and inland water bodies and the coastal zone on the one hand, and a demand for proactive enactment of legislation to protect traditional fisher peoples' preferential access as well as their customary rights over coastal and marine spaces. They also sought a debt waiver for fisherfolk along with farmers, and an end to the import of fish. And foremost, they demanded the withdrawal of the Coastal Management Zone (CMZ) notification, proposed by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). The message was clear in the voice of leaders like T Peter from Kerala. He said, "we have not come to Delhi for sight-seeing, we have come to tell the government that policies like CMZ should be thrown into the sea."
A draft CMZ notification was issued amidst stiff controversy by the MoEF on 1 May 2008, seeking public comments. It was reissued in July 2008, with the MoEF providing more time for one and all to send in their feedback. But a controversial history precedes these notifications. The current round of proposed CMZ notifications seek to replace the previous avatar - the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification, 1991. The formal process to revamp the old CRZ notification began in 2005 when the MoEF constituted a committee set up under the chairmanship of Dr. M S Swaminathan.
Today's CMZ finds itself based fairly substantially on the principles prescribed in the Swaminathan committee's recommendations. The report of the committee and subsequent internal drafts of the MoEF were based almost entirely on discussions with industry representatives and state...
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