KOCHI: T D Unnikrishnan, a fisherman from Kalamukku, Vypeen, Kochi, has not gone out to the sea for the last one week. The scrapping of `1,000 and `500 denomination notes on November 8, literally turned his life upside down. “In the first two days that followed the government decision to pull out the high denomination notes, we accepted the notes for our catch. Now, we have to stand in the queue before the banks for long hours to swap these notes,” he says, adding, “If I stand in the queue, I stand to lose a day’s work”.
The woes of Unnikrishnan do not end here. “Our existing buyers and middlemen have no currency notes with small denomination. The fisheries sector has ground to a halt due to the demonetisation. The sales have plummeted,” he says.
Matsyafed director board member Austin Gomez, who echoed Unnikrishnan, said the fishing sector in the state was staring at a major crisis. “There is a huge dent in their income as no one is venturing out to the sea,” he says, adding, around 2.5 lakh families in the coastal region have been affected.
“The small scale vendors are not coming to the harbour to buy fish. Due to this, the purchasing power of people has nosedived and they are stuck with high denomination notes, including the new `2,000 note.
The fish vendors have no change and this means that they can’t give balance to those who buy the fish. This has caused a huge fall in the sales,” says Gomez.
The current crisis is a double whammy for the fisheries sector, which has witnessed a fall in catch since 2012. And Fisheries Minister Mercykutty Amma has expressed the LDF Government’s helplessness on the issue. “The non-availability of money is a hurdle to the state government’s initiatives for the fishing community,” the minister said.