It’s stinking. To an urban nose, it is even nauseating. The stench of rotten fish mingles with the early morning breeze. Seagulls hover eyeing an easy catch as a gloomy dawn breaks at Beypore, one of Kerala’s major fishing harbours. For hundreds of fish workers at the harbour, for whom the working day begins at 4 a.m., the stench hardly matters. They are sorting the catch that landed ashore last evening; crushing huge blocks of ice for use in freezers on board boats; loading nets, wire-ropes, water canisters, groceries and other essentials onto boats which are roaring to go out into the sea; and, unloading box after box of fish from boats that had returned from the sea after sundown. But, the harbour is half as busy as it was a fortnight agobefore the onset of the currency crisis triggered by demonetisation. Have money, no cash Mohammed Razik, a commission agent, is deeply worried. I don’t know how to pay the boys’ who are helping to unload the fish boxes from the boats, he tells The Hindu. They need to be paid in cash on the spot after the work is over, he says. Razik hardly has any cash in hand. He has money in the bank, but the Rs. 24,000 limit for this week has already been reached. If I don’t pay them at least a part of their wages, they may not show up for work tomorrow, he says in anguish. Dozens of commission agents (or Tharakans) like Mr. Razik, who operate at the Beypore fishing harbour and who are an important link in the largely informal fishery economy, are in deep trouble because of the scrapping of the high denomination notes. The Tharakan has been a unique institution in Kerala’s fishery economy for a long time. He is a middle man between the fishermen and the fish buyer and he links the fish to the market. He finances the fishing trips. For his work, the Tharakan gets a commissionranging from 3 per cent to 5 per cent of the value of the catch. Cash economy The Tharakan, sometimes dubbed an exploiter, oils the fishery economy with his cash liquidity. Almost the entire operation is in cash. Without the help of the Tharakans, it is hard to run the fishery business, says Murali, who is a co-owner of a fishing boat. The Tharakans take care of all the day-to-day payments, he says. When the Tharakans’ cash flows dry up, the fishery economy dries up too. The cash-trapped Tharakan is now the symbol of the cash crunch facing the Beypore fishing harbour, which is home to around 450 boats. Because of the crunch, every single person involved in the hundreds of different tasks in fishing the men who go on the boat, those who break ice blocks, the tea vendor, the lottery agent, the lorry drivers are all affected badly. On average, 50 families rely on a single fishing boat for their livelihood, points out K. Preman, the president of the Beypore Fishing Harbour Development Committee. The man in charge of the toll booth at the harbour says, Our collection has more than halved as people don’t have the money to pay and we often look the other way when small vehicles pass. The lottery vendor rues that the fisherfolk, great believers in the luck factor, now turn their back on seeing him. Phones go off Nearly three-fourths of the workers on the sea-going boats at Beypore are migrant labour from Eastern India. The mobile phone is the lifeline for them, says M. Basheer, president of the Kozhikode district unit of the Fish Merchants and Commission Agents Association. Now they are unable to pay even for the connection recharge. And, naturally, mobile shop owners complain that demonetisation has ruined their business. The fishing harbour, which fuels the economy of Beypore town and a large stretch of the coastal Kozhikode, is in for bleaker dawns as the currency crisis tends to stay longer. Other fishing harbours and fish landing centres in Kerala face the same crisis, too.
2016, The Hindu