Baba and Geetanjali maushi represent an entire community of Koli fishing families, who are now losing a vital piece of their livelihood and heritage: the silver pomfret. Native to the western coast of India, the silver pomfret is among the most prized catches, making up around 40,000 metric tonnes of landings along the coast. Walk into a Koli house and you will immediately be met with the heady aroma of ambat, a tangy pomfret curry with a tamarind base, or lock eyes with a coconut-stuffed pomfret. This buttery fish is heavily adored and highly overfished, leading to a slow but definite decline in its population. 

The declining population of the pomfret is a result of various problems compounding into one. From changing seas to unregulated fishing to urbanisation and industrial development, the fish is just another one in a long line of collapsing species. 

Omkar Bhurke, a Koli marine biologist based in Goa, explains that the primary reason for this decline is overfishing, where juvenile and sub-adult fish are caught during breeding seasons, before they have had a chance to lay eggs, reducing the adult population. The survival of the juveniles is also threatened by rising sea surface temperatures and changing water currents. 

Additionally, local ecological knowledge — an innate intuition which the fishing community passed down generation to generation — is being lost as people have grown emotionally detached from the sea, and the sea and the environment surrounding it are changing. “We are losing a significant chunk of local ecological knowledge. I remember someone telling me that they see a certain type of bird flying near the ship, and they’ll know where to cast the net. Now, there is someone else going out to fish. They have come to the city to earn money. So, they are more concerned about the amount of fish they catch,” he says. The issue, to sum up, is a “disconnect between the community and the occupation”.

Siddharth Chakravarty, a researcher working with small scale fishworkers and policymaking, sees this detachment as a result of a larger web of development along the coast. “The Koli identity is tied to the sea, and so it’s not that the community’s affect with the sea is missing. Development in Bombay has ghettoed them into very small corners where koliwada sizes haven’t increased in 30-40 years, but the population has, leading to high population densities and cramping. Of course, we can’t discard the amount of industrial effluent and waste that flows out from Mumbai into the sea and infrastructure development that blocks the natural flow of rivers.”

Much needs to change for the Kolis to think of the sea in a different way, and think of themselves as being in a city that respected the sea?

Ankush Shewale, an activist and seafood supplier, offers some insight into a very specific problem — the irregular mesh sizes of the fishing nets. While the prescribed mesh size for the pomfret is 150-166mm, to ensure juveniles are not caught, smaller sizes are used, particularly by fishermen trying to maximise their catch.