After the hearing, we met the Tamilnadu Chief Secretary and Relief commissioner and presented a set of demands and actions that came out of the hearing, which they promised to look into.  The 4 main recommendations from the hearing were:

• Publish lists in each village with names of all the affected people who have been enumerated – and allow time for the local people left out to enroll themselves.  This transparency would go a long way in meeting people’s demands.

• Long term plan for food:  Provide special rations for the affected families for at least two years – in many cases, particularly agricultural labor whose lands are now saline, it will take at least that long to get back to work.

• Provision of food and cash for work schemes in all the villages.

• Special programs to support the vulnerable sections.

The government did take up and implement several of the demands - though not as effectively as we would have wanted.

Campaign against Prawn Farms!

In many villages the Tsunami water had entered into the fields and made it saline. Instead of regenerating the land (which will take money and time and technology inputs – but which is very doable as Revathi and others are demonstrating), the government is trying make these lands permanently saline – by encouraging prawn farms. The logic seems to be “it is already saline and spoilt, why not spoil it even further while we earn some money in the short run”.  But history of prawn farms in Tamilnadu has been quite terrible.  There are a large number of unlicensed prawn farms across the coast.  These farms (which use a lot of chemicals) pollute the land and water – not just the land where the prawn farm is – but also the all nearby lands.  One small farm is enough to affect another 10-20 farmers nearby – and the bigger prawn farms affect the entire village.  Farmers and agriculture workers have been protesting against prawn farms for a number of years.  It is one of the most un-sustainable changes our agriculture scene has been facing over the last decade.

After the Tsunami the Government is now trying to pass through the Aquaculture bill (which is waiting for the President’s assent) – this bill will legitimize all the illegal prawn farms and will encourage people to set up more prawn farms.  Once this is done, it will be extremely hard to reverse the process and it will become impossible to close down the existing illegal farms.

Along with a number of other organizations and under the leadership of Farmers Associations, we took up a campaign to stop the spread of Prawn Farms and to close the illegal farms.  This campaign is still on-going – but given the strong prawn farm lobby rallied against us, we will need a lot of help and support before we can succeed.