Fishing is banned to protect brood hilsa, yet seasonal fishers are catching hilsa almost unhindered along about 25 kilometres of the Padma and Jamuna at Shibalaya in Manikganj. Buyers crowd the riverbanks every day at dawn and at night, and traders buy the fish cheaply and resell it at high prices around the district.
Locals say some people on the riverbanks and chars do other work all year and take to the river with boats and nets only when the ban begins, preparing for it a month ahead. Professional fishers generally stay off the water at this time. Seasonal fishers Faruk Hossain, Barek Sheikh and Amjad Hossain of Goalia reckon there are about 3,000 seasonal fishers on the 25 km stretch from Daulatpur to Nayakandi in Shibalaya.
The hilsa is sold openly at Alokdia, Char Shibalaya, Hemganj, Baghutia, Jafarganj, Dala Maluchi, Goalia and elsewhere. Trading runs for about an hour before first light and again from evening until late at night, the two times, fishers and buyers say, when there are no drives on the river.
Saiful Islam, who had come to sell hilsa in the Kalabagan area, said seasonal fishers sell fish that run four or five to the kilogram at Tk 400 to 500 a kg, and fish of a kilogram or 800 grams at Tk 800 to 900 a kg. Taken to other areas, a one-kilogram hilsa sells for Tk 1,400 to 1,500 a kg and smaller ones for Tk 700 to 800.
The fishers say they keep track of the authorities through their own people: when a mobile court sets off for the river, a phone call warns them and they move their trawlers away for a while. Amjad Hossain said that on slow days they rent deep freezers in riverside homes and sell the fish in markets after the ban ends, and when a drive takes their nets they return with new ones.
Upazila fisheries officer Sathi Rani Niyogi said 64 mobile-court drives so far have seized 354 kg of hilsa and 4.7 million metres of current net, worth an estimated Tk 5 crore, and 37 fishers have been jailed or fined. The upazila administration and the fisheries office are doing their utmost to protect brood hilsa, she said. Upazila nirbahi officer Manisha Rani Karmakar could not be reached on her mobile phone.
The report is by Niranjan Sutradhar, Samakal's Shibalaya (Manikganj) correspondent.
Photo: Fahad Faisal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0); hilsa from the Padma river.
Source: samakal
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