Fishcopfed’s Vice-Chairman Ramdas Sandhe along with Palghar Lok Sabha seat MP Rajendra Gavit met Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently and raised long pending issues of fisheries cooperatives.
“The meeting held at Parliament office of the Prime Minister was focused on discussions about issues related to the fisheries sector”, claimed Sandhe who is a well-known co-operator from the fisheries sector.
Soon after the meeting Ramdas Sandhe shared the details with Indian Cooperative correspondent on the phone saying, “We met the Prime Minister and raised several issues related to the fisheries cooperative sector. I was happy to note that PM Modi sounded eager to know about our issues.”
“Maharashtra is a leading state in marine fisheries, it has more than 160 landing centers along the 720 km coast from Palghar to Sindhudurg. Fishermen work hard to preserve fish in a good condition so they could get better prices at the landing centers”, he informed.
However, landing centers in Maharashtra lack hygiene compared to the other landing centers in the country. This can be blamed on the lack of necessary infrastructure. There is an urgent need to take a slew of measures to improve the hygiene, the visiting delegation demanded.
Sandhe requested the Prime Minister to waive off loans and interest of those fishermen who died due to natural calamities in respective states. The former government had brought in the provision of giving Rs 1.50 per liter subsidy on diesel for boats of fishermen but it has yet to be given. Please intervene in the matter and get the Rs 5 per liter subsidy approved”, they urged the Prime Minister.
Besides, Vice-Chairman of Fishcopfed Sandhe also urged the PM to expand the insurance scheme up to Rs 5 lakh given to fishermen. There are more than 18,000 Primary Fishermen Cooperative Societies as its members and around 30 lakh fishermen’s are associated with Fishcopfed.
Until the last few years Fishcopfed always got a clean bill of health but it began to face trouble when the service charges for insuring fishermen were held-up in the government files. For the past five years, the co-op federation has been facing difficulties paying the staff and running offices spread across the country.
It bears recall that Fishcopfed is the nodal agency for insuring fishermen and had done the remarkable job of insuring close to 42 lakh of them till last year. The data for this year is awaited.