Patience, it is said is a virtue. And fisherman are endowed with it in abundance because it is a survival necessity.
The family job card of 37-year-old Gadi Govinda Raju of Interu village in Krishna district is otherwise a rough notebook which his kids have filled with doodles and drawings.
Have job cards, no work
The job card issued in early 2011 became useless to Mr. Raju’s family as they were not given enough work under the MGNREGS. Many fisherfolk families in the village still preserve the job cards though there’s no guarantee of work. Call it hope and patience.
“We got work for a few days, less than a fortnight in early 2012 and those were the last working days under the MNREGS in our village. No village-level or panchayat level co-ordinator has been around offer work till now,” says Gadi Govinda Raju and his wife G. Peddintlamma. Locals have shown the job cards with blank pages to The Hindu .
Forced to migrate
Compelled, dozens of couples migrate to neighbouring Tamil Nadu, searching for work in the agriculture sector round the year and return to the village at the onset of monsoon. Reason? They would catch “Asian Seabass seed” and rear it for selling to aqua farmers.
Interu village is one of the three villages under the Interu Panchayat - Interu, Satrapalem, and Parvathipuram - in Krithivennu mandal.
According to the 2011 Census, the panchayat comprises 340 families with a population of 1,309 people, with nearly 50% females.
It is surrounded by aqua ponds being cultivated by major aqua firms and salt fields.
“The water body on the outskirts of our village has been filled with mangrove cover over the years, impacting the fishing. In a year, every single family is being forced to migrate to Tamil Nadu state in any point in time,” another fisherman Odugu Lakshmana Rao pointed out.
“We are being deprived of every minimum facility including water and work to run our families. Any means of work at the local level would be a great support for us,” said Odugu Nagamani, another job cardholder.
