Google,Facebook power Kutch fishing community protest

If ever there was a how to protest handbook,a poor fishing community in Kutch may just be rewriting it....

If ever there was a how to protest handbook,a poor fishing community in Kutch may just be rewriting it. Instead of the usual dharnas and fasts,the residents of Bhadreshwar village on the Kutch coast are opting for Google maps,a collective account on Facebook,letters to officials and RTI applications,and a regularly updated blog http://masskutch.blogspot.com to power their protest

The protest is against the UK-based OPG companys plan to set up a thermal power plant on the Kutch Coast. While the company has now said it is kickstarting its Corporate Social Responsibility operations in the area,the villagers have already come up with a cooperative-based marketing strategy for the fish they catch. Called the Producers Group,their strategy has been developed by a cohort of NGOs - Swiss Development Corporation -funded-Setu,Fish Management and Resource Centre or FishMarc - an organisation founded by an alumnus of the Institute of Rural Management,Anand (IRMA) and a womens group called Ujjas.

A number of fishermen are provided loans to clear their debts and Setu then contacts a fish merchant and ink an agreement to sell the fish at a fixed price. The money is then deposited in a collective bank account for the fishermen .

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Project leader Shibu John,said the Producers group,which now has about 160 boats as members,had a turnover of Rs 80 lakhs in 2009,and earned the group a 2 per cent profit. But we are not going to register ourselves as a cooperative. A cooperative will mean we would have to host government representatives, he said.

Activists Bharat Patel,Parthasarathy and three others have as their tools of choice are a BSNL 256 kbps internet connection,a desktop computer and a laptop.

They have put together one annexures after another showing photographs,Google Earth Images,Google maps,copies of official documents and RTI replies. Some of the same contents have also been digitised and positioned on the blog.

Technology is clearly no more the preserve of a few.

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