Fishing for food

NANMANGALAM LIES some six km to the south west of Nanganallur down a dusty, bumpy road. The calm in this village is striking. The only noise is that of occasional tractors or tankers. At other times one can hear the buzz of flies and bees - and the mosquito.

Not far from Ranganathachari's 1.1 acre farm (where this former agriculture officer has a farm full of yielding fruit trees and an improvised "jet irrigation system" instead of the more- expensive drip irrigation system) is the Nanmangalam eri (tank), now dry as a dessicant and pockmarked with encroachments all round. Houses have been built on this poramboke land and I wondered what would happen if it rained heavily and all the surface run-off were directed to the eri. When there is water, it runs into the irrigation channels automatically. There is no control as the villagers have broken down the sluice gate - a move that also protects the encroachments from being submerged.

At regular intervals down the macadamised road which cuts through paddy fields all round, there are flexible hoses jutting from inverted L-shaped pipes. These fill the tankers which ferry water to the city for profit. The water remaining in the bend of one hose tasted good and I learnt that tankers are the most frequent visitors to this area. The farmers have learnt quickly that irrigation bores run with subsidised or free electricity yield immediate benefits. Hard cash. Without the "blood, sweat and tears" of sowing, transplanting, irrigating and waiting for crops which may not yield a good margin at the wholesale grain market.

Just a short walk down the tarred road that runs almost parallel to the Nanmangalam eri, there is a huge, open irrigation well with calf-deep slush. Men in pairs held what seemed from a distance to be handloom towels and trudged along slowly, almost scraping the bottom edge of the towel along the bed of the well, hunting for fish.

Where did the fish come from? "From the acquifer that recharges the well," said a passer-by. "The source is the rain," said another. It was like a dream to imagine an additional element - fish - in the hydrological cycle, with fingerlings levitating along with droplets of water, floating around in the cloud, threatening aircraft with minor dents on the fusilage, and returning to earth with the rain.

Whatever the source, there was fish. Fingerlings along with six- inch long fish were rounded up by the fine-mesh cloth. The larger fish were caught and tossed to two men sitting on a dry stretch of mud bed. These were grabbed promptly and dumped into a mudpot of water. The fingerlings were granted immediate freedom. You will find smaller fish for sale in the market.

The instinct of these unlettered men fitted perfectly with the theory of renewable resource - the partial bell-shaped curve being cut by the straight line depicting the rate of resource extraction to show the theoretical static equilibrium point - I studied years ago in a course on resource economics. Here the move favoured the fingerlings which were granted the freedom to live, feed on a fast-depleting resource (microorganisms in water) and grow.

It is possible that unless the rains come soon enough, the well will become dry, given the near-40oC temperature. But instead of drawing all the fish in a day and twiddling the thumbs thereafter, these men have decided to save the resource till the fish is at least as large as these men want them to be. In contrast was my trip on a deep sea fishing trawler some years ago, when the catch by the huge nets after scraping the sea bed, was dumped on the deck. The larger fish were sorted out and the remaining, including fingerlings, allowed to perish before they were swept back into the sea. As the trawler crawled at five knots, I could see the dead fish bobbing up and down before disappearing out of sight.

Obviously the unlettered men can teach us more than a thing or two about ecology and conservation of resources. These men cannot give us suave lectures on theory, but are we willing to watch, listen, learn and implement the simple techniques that work?

GOUTAM GHOSH

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