After years of delays from the Maharashtra government, more than 72,000 fishworkers in the State have got their long-promised biometric identity cards. On Friday, the Fisheries Department distributed around 66,000 biometric cards to fishermen from Thane and Palghar districts, and another 12,000 cards in Satpati, a fishing village in Palghar. Mr. Wayda said that another 70,000 cards would be distributed in a second phase shortly.
The cards would be needed to set up a National Marine Fishermen Database, accessible by central and state security agencies and armed forced. The national biometric cards will replace all other cards issued to fishworkers by different national and local agencies. The Centre had proposed the need for these cards in 2009, when the terror attacks in Mumbai by attackers who came in via the sea highlighted the porousness of India’s coastline. Each card costs around Rs. 85 to make, and the maritime agencies or forces authorised to check these IDs would need card readers, which costs around Rs. 13,000. The Registrar General of India has sanctioned Rs. 72 crore from the Centre, to issue the 1.50 crore cards to fishermen across the country.
According to Ravindra Wayda, Additional Fisheries Commissioner, Thane, the Centre will issue around 20 lakh cards all over India. He said local fishworkers’ cooperative have been entrusted with enlisting fishermen for the cards, with no need for police verification.
But the fishing community said the cooperatives were causing the delays. Poornima Meher, Vice President, National Fishworkers’ Forum, New Delhi, told The Hindu that the task of identifying the fishworkers had been given to the various cooperative societies, and these cooperatives insist of verifying documents from the fishermen, who did not have existing documents, which led to further delays.
A simple physical verification of the claims to be fishworkers would suffice, she added. Some of the delays, she said, were because of the formats in which the government wanted information. “First of all, the forms are in Hindi,” she said, “which the local fishermen do not follow, as they only know Marathi or Konkani. Also, even if the forms are filled, the papers get lost in transit; thus the fishermen are denied biometric cards.”
Pascal Dhanare, the MLA from Dahanu (ST) Assembly constituency said the members of the fishworkers’ cooperatives have to be pushed to list the names of fishermen for the biometric cards. He said he would take up the issue during the monsoon session of the State Assembly.
Mr. Wayda said he would look into the look into delays allegedly being caused by the methods used by cooperatives. He said the biometric cards could be issued to the khalasi s (fishworkers) on the recommendation of the trawler owners they worked for.
Mr. Wayda also said that only men would be getting the cards as a matter of course; women fishworkers would have to show they were in the fishing business. Women fish vendors would get net cards, he said.
