SAMBALPUR: The fish farmers of the Hirakud Cage Culture Project seek compensation and relief packages from the state government, placing on record the grave injustice, financial ruin and continuing hardship they suffered due to the grossly negligent planning, execution and supervision of the project by the previous BJD government and the Fisheries Department.
Blaming the Naveen-led BJD government for inducing and persuading them to invest substantial personal funds in the project through official assurances, publicity and claims of assured success, the farmers said it was never disclosed to them that even the pilot project implemented by the Fisheries Department in the Hirakud Reservoir had already failed. “This material suppression of facts vitiated our consent and investment decisions,” they said.
More than five years after the formal launch of the project by the then Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, the project has failed entirely, causing each participating farmer to suffer massive and irrecoverable financial losses. The project’s collapse exposes the hollow and misleading claims made by the previous government regarding self-sufficiency and progress in the fisheries sector, they said.
“It is pertinent to record that we strictly complied with every guideline, condition and restriction imposed by the Fisheries Department, including those formulated with technical inputs from WorldFish. These are related to fish seed, feed, medicines, chemicals, stocking density and water usage. Officials from the office of the Deputy Director of Fisheries, Sambalpur, maintained continuous surveillance over our sites to ensure rigid compliance,” they said, stressing that any attempt to attribute the failure to farmer non-compliance is factually incorrect and untenable.
Despite such strict control and supervision, there was a complete absence of professional hand-holding, technical troubleshooting or institutional support during the critical implementation and take-off phase, they said. “No assistance whatsoever was provided for storage, cold chain, processing, packaging or marketing, rendering the project commercially unviable from inception,” they informed PBD.
The most shocking and indefensible act was the directive issued by the Fisheries Department instructing them to forcibly remove the entire fish stock and dump it in pits along the riverbank, accompanied by a detailed Standard Operating Procedure for destruction of the stock. “This arbitrary and irrational order resulted in the total loss of standing assets and dealt a crippling blow to our livelihoods,” they said, pointing out that the decision was taken without any consultation, compensation mechanism or rehabilitation plan and is patently violative of the principles of natural justice and fairness.
Further placing on record that even after stocking and experimenting with all fish species recommended by the Fisheries Department and WorldFish, there was no sustainable biological or economic success they could achieve, clearly demonstrating systemic project failure rather than farmer error, they said.
Stating that all of them were first-generation fish farmers who invested in good faith and were irreversibly damaged due to administrative negligence, misrepresentation and failure of duty on the part of the previous government and its implementing agencies, they said, “The losses suffered by us are humungous, verifiable and beyond our capacity to absorb.”
In addition to the factual position narrated above, the farmers also faced an extremely critical situation when the water level of the reservoir receded by 30 feet during summer, resulting in the total collapse of cage culture activities in the reservoir. Such a situation should have been well conceived and visualised by the consultant WorldFish during the planning stage, which clearly reveals that no proper study was undertaken before floating such an idea of cage culture. “We also faced repeated Nor’westers (Kalbaisakhi) every year, which damaged our cages and sheds to a great extent,” said a cage culture farmer.
The farmers are placing on record substantive facts exposing the misleading manner in which the previous BJD government projected the introduction of cage culture in the Hirakud Dam, said the Immediate Past President of UCCIL, Brahmanand Mishra, who had taken the initiative to convene a meeting with the concerned departments, highlighting that industry stakeholders had already expressed serious concerns. The issue deserves an impartial review by the present BJP government in the larger public interest, he said.
Placing their grievances on record, the farmers have demanded appropriate financial compensation for the losses incurred by each affected farmer; announcement of a special relief and rehabilitation package for Hirakud Cage Culture farmers; institution of an independent inquiry into the failure of the project, including the role of the Fisheries Department and WorldFish; and fixing accountability for the misleading assurances and arbitrary directives issued to farmers.
