The once ubiquitous figure of the toiling woman on farmlands has long faded. Today, a landscape, once dotted by direct-sown fields that summoned the woman worker, has been altered by shrimp farms from Velankanni to Thiruthuraipoondi.
And the loss of women workers and the impact of shrimp farms have been ignored.
Two decades after shrimp industry made entry with claims of local employment, its actual employment pattern was as follows. Irrespective of the size of the pond (.5 ha to 1 ha), each seed-stocked pond is manned by one person.
A big farm may have a maximum of eight ponds, employing not more than 10 persons for 120 days. This land-labour ratio was grossly disproportionate to the vast hectares of cultivable land acquired by shrimp farms.
In the absence of sex-disaggregated data on women’s labour in shrimp farms, field study by The Hindu reveal zero employment of women at the production level.
Women are used for pond clearance after harvest. The cyclical feeding of shrimp requires resident labourers and women were not suitable for that task, says Swarnalatha, a prawn farm owner.
Shrimp farms have snatched the wage earning capacity of farm women. “The money earned by the men in shrimp farms barely reaches their home, and gets used up in Tasmac shops,” says Senbagavalli.
It’s a dual battle for women; their labour displacement aside, women bear the social costs arising out of loss of common property resources from discharge of untreated effluents into waterbodies and salination of groundwater – and forced to walk long distances for potable water.
“Today, there is a shrimp farm owning elite and the rest of the displaced labour, and those waiting in the wings to join the shrimp culture,” says Birla Thangadurai, member, district monitoring committee for bonded labour.
A new form of feudal land-relations is at play with new elite of non-resident big farmers, who acquired vast hectares of land in the early 1990s, as government clamoured for foreign exchange reserves through then nascent export-oriented shrimp culture.
Although, shrimp lobby claims to represent small-marginal local farmers, there is no collective bargaining as the export market favours only the big farmers. One farmer shifting to shrimp culture triggers a cascading effect. “When a farmer two fields away puts up a shrimp farm, I don’t have a choice to cultivate with the saline water in his pond,” says Ramamoorthy of Vettaikaraniruppu.
