A few more from Kerala

We wake up at 2 am to go fishing with Salas and crew. Salas’s fishing village is approximately an hour’s drive south of Cochin. It is a picturesque village. Brightly-coloured fishing boats are docked on the beach on wooden planks. Coconut palms sway in the background. At 4 am though, it is all a uniform shade of grey.

Salas and his crew are early-morning fishermen. There are fishing boats setting out at all hours of the day. Each have their own theories on the best times for catching fish.

Salas’ boat is a small fibre-glass boat with an outboard motor. All of us take our positions around the boat and slide the boat on the planks towards the sea. As the boat moves off one plank, somebody runs ahead with it to put it in front of the boat.

When the boat reaches the sea, we clamber into it. The other villagers give it one final heave, the motor spurts to life and we are off. The shore recedes away into the distance.

An hour into the sea, Salas picks a spot to fish. He stops the boat, and figures out the movement of the shoals, the direction of the tide, the depth of the waters and other things. He is not satisfied and we move off again to another spot.

Salas likes this spot. The five-member crew begin casting their net into the sea. It is 5 km long. The net has been meticulously folded to make casting it simple and quick. One of the crew picks up the weights that the net is tied to and drops them one after another into the sea. The boat keeps moving to cover as large an area as possible. Plastic jerry-cans tied to ropes are also dropped into the sea. They serve as buoys, marking the limits of the net.

The crew waits for 10-15 minutes before hauling the net back in. Three men pull up the net, the other two wait behind to extricate the fish out of the net. The fish gets dumped at the bottom of the boat. The catch looks sparse.

The crew chant to a beat to coordinate their efforts in pulling the net up. They have now struck a shoal and the net is heavy. Every foot they pull up is rich with fish, and the two men behind now stop extricating the fish from the net, and help in pulling it up.

An hour and a half later, the net is drawn up completely. Salas heads the boat to the landing centre. He uses his mobile phone to call someone on the shore, to tell our driver to head to the landing centre to pick us up.

In our conversations with fishermen and representatives of fishing federations, we have come to know that mobile phone signals extend to 12 km into the sea. Fishermen, however, fish up to 100 km into the sea, and therefore, the mobile phone offers only limited connectivity to them as far as they are concerned. What they’d like most of all are mobile telephony towers in the middle of the sea. The government and the networks should do something about this jointly, they feel.

Fishermen primarily use mobile phones in the sea for three things. It is a convenient emergency tool, when within range. Storm warnings are communicated to them from the shore, and in case of engine failure, they can call the shore for help. There was a storm warning a month earlier, and many fishermen escaped it as they were warned about it in time through the mobile phone. Others who were out of range had had to be airlifted, and three fishing boats went missing.

They also use it to communicate with other fishing boats to determine where the best catches are. It is especially convenient when they set off together in two boats or more.

A third use is to find out the price on shore once the catch is brought up. This helps them to decide which landing centre to head to, as the price at each landing centre varies depending on the amount of catch brought in that day. However, this advantage has been neutralized now, since the buyers of fish at the shore also have mobile phones and they use them to fix the prices between each other. Many fishermen feel that the price of the catch has actually dropped with the advent of the mobile phone.

Today, however, Salas has no need to use his mobile phone. The sea has been calm, and the engine, though it has gone off a few times, has restarted every time. The catch has been good too, and this being the off-season, there’s not so much fish being brought in daily and he knows he’ll get a good price at his regular landing centre, so he doesn’t need to call the shore to find out the price. During season though, he does that, to determine which landing centre to head to.

We head to the landing centre. The fishermen make space in the centre of the boat, and begin to remove the fish from the net, sorting them out into different sizes in the different compartments of the boat.

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The landing centre is a large beach. A hundred odd boats are in the sea and on the shore, and people mill around noisily. Catches get brought in in baskets from the boats and the tharakans conduct auctions for each lot.

Francis is a tharakan at the Pallithode landing centre. He uses his mobile to contact boats in the sea to tip them off on prices at the landing centre. This helps the fishermen decide where to take their catch. It’s in the tharakan’s interest too.

Most boats are jointly owned by an investor and/or a tharakan and the fisherman. This makes it mandatory for the fishermen to go through the tharakan once they have their catch. The owners keep 50% of the profit. The tharakan gets a share of this profit, as well as a cut for offering his services as an auctioneer. It is therefore in the tharakan’s interest as well that the fishermen get the best price.

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Behind the landing centre, vendors have set up tea-stalls and hotels on the sands for the fishermen and the buyers. They are temporary, constructed out of bamboos and plastic sheets. The stoves are wood fires, and the seating is on wooden benches and tables.

Sheebu owns one such hotel. He bought a mobile phone for general use, but has found a lot of use for it in his work. Fishermen call him up from the boats to find out the price of fish at the landing centre. Fishermen are always trooping in and out of his hotel, and they keep him informed about the price of fish. He doesn’t charge for this service, but he knows that if the fishermen land here, it will only be good for his business.

The mobile phone also helps him in another way. His brother has a small transport vehicle to transport fish from the shore. If the vehicle is away on errand, and a customer needs it, he calls up his brother on the mobile. He can be there in 10-15 minutes, meanwhile the customer helps his business with some tea and snacks, and his brother does not lose out on any business.

The mobile phone also helps him with the mundane matter of ordering supplies for his hotel when he runs out of them.

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Ashraff Mattancherry sells lottery tickets to fishermen at the landing centre. He used to be a fisherman himself once, but now makes a living selling lottery tickets. He carries a mobile phone, but it’s not for business reasons. He uses it to keep in touch with family members in Dubai.

Ashraff makes anything from 90 paise to Rs.2/- on the sale of one ticket. He manages to make about Rs.200/- per day. Though his work needs him to be mobile, Ashraff doesn’t have much use for a mobile phone in his work. Lottery tickets are impulse purchases and customers don’t go around looking for a seller. At best, he uses it to get in touch with the agent to return unsold stock.

The lottery draw is usually at 2.30, and Ashraff has to inform the agent about unsold tickets before 1.30, to have them taken back or annulled. If he fails to intimate the agent in time, he has to pay for the unsold tickets. The mobile phone helps him sell tickets until the deadline without worrying about having to return the unsold tickets well in time.