Fisheries

From its rather benign origins connoting a type of land classification, the term poromboke has transformed into something grotesque over the years. This term had been in use since the Cholas denoting stretches of land reserved for shared communal use which cannot be bought or sold.

At a time when the government’s attention is steered towards the concerns of the northern rivers like the Ganga and the Yamuna, it is seldom that the polluted rivers of the south India come up for discussion.

Jaman Ram, a resident of Bhikia Sain, a tehsil in Uttarakhand, remembers fishing with his father in the Ramganga. “We could catch 80-100 kilograms of fish a day. That is no longer possible,” he says. Shafiq of Haldwani shares an unsettling memory of the Ramganga. As a young man on a holiday, he was paddling in the river near Marchula when the rock he was standing on shifted.

Going by the statistics from the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Tamil Nadu’s coastline is densely populated with 573 fishing villages along 13 coastal districts. The story is slightly different around the urban and peri-urban coastline, thanks to the ongoing gentrification of the coastline in most parts of urban India.

Lingaraj Jena is a worried man. At 86, he is one of the older fishermen in Berhampura village, an island on the Chilika lake in Odisha. Though he no longer goes for fishing due to old age, he is worried about the opening of new sea mouths; he knows it is not good news for the fishing communities he is a part of that depend on the Chilika for their livelihood.

Most of Hyderabad water bodies reduced to cesspools

An aerospace engineer from IIT, Kharagpur, Siddharth Agarwal could have been drawing a fancy salary like any other 25-year-old if he hadn’t followed his passion.

Government decides to create a permanent tribunal for all inter-state river disputes

One of Tamil Nadu’s most populist leaders and a big inspiration to women across the state and beyond, J. Jayalalithaa has left an indelible mark on the people as well as the politics of the state. Though detractors objected to the ‘Amma’ prefix in most of her schemes, the people of Tamil Nadu did not seem to mind, given that many of their basic needs stood satisfied to a great extent.

Long necked, rosy white birds with heavy pink bills stand etched across the horizon. These are the flamingos that fly miles from across Iran’s Caspian Sea and the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, to reach the inland waters of Point Calimere Wildlife and Bird Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu.