South Indian Fisherwomen Map Their Own Future

Jesu is known among fisher people across India as Akka (elder sister), a sisterly comrade.

Trained as a lawyer and urged by her family to seek a prestigious position in the Indian civil service, Jesu first learned of the systemic oppression of fisher communities in 1982, when members of a majoritarian Indian fundamentalist group attacked fisher communities on the Tamil Nadu coast. The incident, which became known as the Mandaikadu riots, culminated in police shooting and killing six fisher community members and injuring 21 others. Jesu, then a young lawyer, worked as an assistant for a formal investigative commission, meeting with the affected communities and collecting evidence. “This was an important learning process for me,” she says. Later, she married Christu Rajan Pius (Christy), a fisher-community activist from Tamil Nadu, and devoted her energy full-time to the struggle. Christy, who died in 2004, and Jesu were dedicated to standing shoulder to shoulder on the ground with fisherwomen to help them emancipate themselves.

She became a pioneer, with her peers Osmund Fernandes (Ossie), Gandimathi Alagar, and others, in the campaign against the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, a shipping canal in the open sea in the Gulf of Mannar Biosphere Reserve, and was also integral to Asia’s first Campaign Against Shrimp Industries (CASI). In her own home city of Nagapattinam on the Tamil Nadu coast, Jesu and the fisherwomen federations have fought off multiple attempts at destructive shoreline development, including port expansion, shrimp farms, and a power plant. With the land spared from these mega-projects, the community has welcomed much less intrusive forms of development, ones that offer educational opportunities to community members who might otherwise have been displaced: Engineering and medical colleges are now placed where a fume-spewing power plant might have been.

Women have borne the brunt of the oppression. Fisherwomen are expected to provide extensive unpaid labour, and while they once freely sold their goods in informal vending hubs, they must now pay for a stall in a formalized fish market. As managers of households, they are also the ones who deal directly with the industrial pollution of their water resources, forcing them to find scarce extra cash to pay for clean drinking water.

And they've also led the charge to reclaim fisher communities’ place in 21st-century India, Jesu says. For many fisherwomen, this political transformation did not happen overnight. It emerged through years of patient organizing, collective discussions, village meetings, struggles against destructive projects, and a growing recognition that women's labour was central to fisheries and community survival.

Saroja B, a fisherwoman leader from Tamil Nadu, explained that Jesu played a critical role in nurturing this process. Rather than speaking on behalf of women, “she encouraged them to speak for themselves, helping them recognize that their everyday work—sorting fish, drying fish, vending, managing households, protecting coastal commons, and resisting displacement—was also political work,” Saroja says. Across coastal Tamil Nadu, fisherwomen increasingly moved from the margins of decision-making to the forefront of community struggles, becoming organizers, negotiators, educators, and leaders in their own right.

Mapping a Better Future

When Jesu filed a Right to Information (RTI) request for the 1991 Coastal Zone Management Plan maps, she found that wetlands documented in the original had been quietly removed from the official version. It was not an isolated error, says Jesu, but rather part of a decades-long pattern of cartographic falsification that has steadily stripped fisher communities of legal recognition and protection.

In 2023, Jesu filed a case with the National Green Tribunal (NGT) demanding recognition of fisher peoples' existence. A year later, in response, the NGT ordered the Coastal Zone Management Authority to map all of the fisher commons, and conduct ground-truthing in ecologically sensitive areas with proper consultation with fisher peoples. At the same time, fisher peoples, particularly fisherwomen, across Tamil Nadu and Karaikal mapped their villages, boat parking areas, dry fish yards, and ecological commons (such as mangroves and wetlands). Without access to cutting-edge technology, fisherwomen traced their villages on chart paper, analyzed them with land records, and prepared their own Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based coastal zone management maps. Women sat together at the village level to review their maps: what was missing, what was present. They organized youth and elders in intergenerational discussions about their coastal and marine commons, and fishing zones in the ocean.

It is within this context that a generation of critical youth has stepped in with participatory rural learning-action methods, working with fisherwomen in each village and embedding GIS within mobile and smartphone platforms, to rebuild and assert their customary governance through community cartography. At the heart of this approach is a recognition of women’s existing knowledge systems.

Lakshmi V, another fisherwoman leader in Tamil Nadu, talked about Jesu’s role in the movement. "Jesu Akka always believed that fisherwomen should lead, not simply participate. Through the community mapping process, she helped us understand that our coast, our commons, our markets, our fishing grounds, and our villages are all questions of rights and justice. Mapping became much more than a technical exercise. It helped educate our communities, bring women, youth, and elders together, strengthen our confidence, and challenge official maps that ignored our existence. She taught us that knowledge in our hands can become power."

Their maps formed a meticulous articulation of their world, detailing fishers’ commons such as auction centres and landing centres, village commons such as hospitals and schools, ecological commons such as dunes and mangroves, and fishing and breeding zones in the sea and intertidal areas. They not only discussed current land use but also marked long-term housing sites to protect their communities from coastal erosion, disasters, and the impacts of the climate crisis. Their visions are futuristic.

The women then collected geocoordinates using handheld GPS devices, mapped the entire village boundary, and digitized the results. They also gathered land records, survey maps, fishing zone information from elders, and oral evidence to validate their findings. Finally, they consulted GIS experts to prepare the final map.

Once mapping was completed, they validated the maps with villagers in public meetings, explaining the details. Women, children, and youths gathered in these village meetings. The maps were then handed to the traditional governance system for further advocacy. Fisher wisdom made this a more democratic process—far more so than the official “public hearings,” where authorities rarely listen to fishers, explained Jesu.

After Jesu secured the NGT judgment, these community maps became the basis for challenging the government’s maps. They are not merely participatory maps but documents asserting rights over the coast and ocean—rights that had remained unrecognized for 78 years since independence.

Fishers produced maps that both symbolically and concretely reclaimed governance rights that the state had never recognized. They have also fought for decades for recognition as “Sea Tribes” (also known as Ocean Adivasis or Neithal Pūrvakudi) under the Scheduled Tribe category, not only for socio-economic empowerment but also to address historical injustice and trauma. Their identities are internationally recognized under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), but not by the Indian state.

The community mapping thus adds pressure to fisher peoples’ longstanding demand for recognition. Recently, the government took an important step in that direction by conducting consultations with fisher communities and providing technical support to strengthen their mapping skills.