Eviction and Displacement: Fisherwomen of Chennai’s Nochikuppam Face Livelihood Crisis

Chennai, like many other Indian metros, has witnessed urban renewal, with the displacement of local inhabitants and their resettlement to distant places such as Kannagi Nagar between 2000 and 2010. In November 2013, street vendors of Chennai’s famous Thyagaraya Nagar were moved to Pondy Bazaar, a commercial complex. This was dysfunctional to their livelihoods but benefited large branded shops in the area. Observing such instances of relocation, including a similar eviction of the Koli community’s fish market in Mumbai, one can see how such attempts disproportionately affect women traders, who are the foundation of entire family systems. Chennai’s “Modern Fish Market,” inaugurated on August 12, follows this trend. Established with the stated purpose of clearing traffic congestion, it greatly impacts fishing women, their ability to anchor their livelihood and their agency to organise.

New market’s promise for “betterment”: from shoreline to surveillance

The Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) released an order on October 18 to evict the Nochikuppam fish market located on Loop Road, a southward extension of Marina Beach Road, which urged the vendors to sell fish only inside the premises of the newly built market. Following this, the entire stretch of Nochikuppam seashore, once a famous fish vending zone, was completely razed with a bulldozer, leaving no evidence of its existence.

During an interview about the eviction, Anandhi*, a single mother who was just starting her first day at the new market, shared her feelings of uncertainty. “Last Sunday, as we were setting up our stalls along the seashore, officers arrived with police and informed us we couldn’t continue there,” she recounted. “They claimed we had agreed to this when we signed the document and received the token for the stall in the new market. We believed it was just to secure the new stall, not realising that it also prohibited us from using our regular spot.”

She further claimed, “When they threatened to throw away the fish if we didn’t comply, some women became agitated. However, when they warned they’d file cases against us if we didn’t leave, we had no choice but to clear out.” The narratives justifying the process of eviction and displacement are centred on claims of a better infrastructure while diluting and diverting from the most prominent question – the loss of the community’s claims over the land, thus altering the socio-spatial relations among them.

The entire zone of Loop Road from the entry point to the market complex has been heavily patrolled by the police, displaying control over potential tensions. Compared to the number of stalls that used to be on the seashore, the new market has been  mostly unoccupied, except the front line and those in a few back rows who had hoped to get allotments in the better locations. Only a few vendors in the back rows had just begun their business and were highly disappointed and worried about the eviction and fall in their everyday business. Between the police patrol and ongoing welding works to add an extended bench and taps in each stall, some were yet to set up their stalls, some were agitated by the unfair stall allotments, and some were figuring out ways to get a better stall location. All these show an underpinning tension prevailing among the vendors in the new market area. Most vendors who disagreed with this move didn’t turn up to put up their stalls even on expectedly busy Sundays.

While the project promotes the “market” as a “facility” which would “rectify” previous problems and benefit the fishers and their wider families and businesses, the irony is that the market is now under strict control of the GCC, with newly installed CCTV cameras, regular police patrols, additional security and specific operating hours. There is also talk of implementing a monthly rental fee as a maintenance charge, though details remain unclear for many vendors. According to some, the rent may be around Rs 3,000 per month, a figure they heard from a YouTube influencer, though officials have yet to confirm this. One vendor noted that rent was waived for the first two months but anticipates that the rent would be collected eventually. “We won’t agree to pay this fee,” she stated firmly, adding that some vendors are willing to pay up only to Rs 500 if required. When asked about the rent a few months ago, another vendor assertively claimed, “They won’t charge; this sea and business belongs to us, and we belong here.”

Loop Road’s construction: bifurcation between fisherwomen and the sea

The Nochikuppam timeline reveals a deeper context regarding its housing settlement, the fishing community and the later development of Loop Road. The Nochikupam fishing hamlet was resettled by the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB) in the 1970s and it was severely affected by the 2004 tsunami. In response, TNSCB, with World Bank funding, constructed new houses in 2014 to replace the dilapidated houses around Marina.

The government had approached the Nochikuppam residents to construct a concrete loop road connecting Marina Lighthouse and Foreshore Estate, which was built between 2013 and 2015, after assuring that it wouldn’t affect the local fishers and would be helpful for their own commute. Initially, vehicles were diverted to the Loop Road only during peak evening hours to regulate the traffic flow on Santhome Road.

The entire route was shifted to the Loop Road in March, where new bus stops have now been installed. Commenting on the road extension, Suganthi*, a vendor, said that they were assured that the Loop Road would be operational only for three months until the completion of the metro works, citing an earlier assurance made that the road would be open to the public only during the morning and evening peak hours. Although theoretically a shortcut, the road doesn’t really serve as a connection between places; it serves instead to segregate fisherwomen from the sea. Construction of the road eventually led to the displacement of the fisherwomen from their land, with the common elitist labels of “hawkers” and “illegal encroachers” applied to them by the court and the GCC.

In February 2023, among the several attempts to evict the Nochikuppam fishing stalls even before the construction of the new market, the vendors had vehemently refused the forceful move and protested on the roads. On April 10, the then-acting chief justice T. Raja of the Madras high court took up a suo moto Public Interest Litigation (PIL) case to regulate the fish market along Loop Road. The special bench ordered the GCC to regulate the traffic congestion on Loop Road by evicting the fish vendors, labelling them as “encroachers” who were primarily causing traffic. A day after the order, the GCC tried to forcibly remove the stalls. After the vendors protested for days, the evictions were halted, and an agreement was reached that they would be designated a temporary place to sell fish and that they would file an appeal petition in the next hearing.

However, the construction of a new fish market commenced on the open land in Nochikuppam, which was originally designated for recreational activities. Even before the suo motu case, on January 10, 2022, the government had issued a sanction order of Rs 9.97 crores to build a “Modern Fish Market” on Loop Road. This indicates that the suo motu case only served to expedite the eviction and relocation process.

Modern Fish Market disconnecting fisherwomen from their livelihoods and agency

While this move of constructing the “modern” fish market was appreciated and projected as an “ideal” method of upgrading and beautifying a city’s space, in line with a “smart” city norm, the market – a sleek white-domed pavilion-like structure – shifts attention away from the real ground issues: how it has disconnected the wider fishing community, especially the women, from their livelihoods, by removing direct access to the sea. Such relocation under urban renewal spurs a politics that pitches women against women (those who got the stalls in the front rows versus those in the rear), further splitting their united voices that have till now been essential to their livelihoods and conducive to their holding a pivotal role in the community. In this situation, social welfare schemes, however well-intentioned, will remain symbolic, leading to further cynicism and future political backlash.

Even preliminary conversations reveal that the construction of a new fish market, along with the processes of allotment, eviction and displacement, all seriously threaten the livelihoods of fisherwomen in the area. There is no evidence of communication by the policymakers and their ground staff to seriously anchor any discussion with the fisherwomen. There is no fundamental evaluation of the decision of the new market complex and the possible alternative of in situ upgrading of facilities to be more viable and less damaging. Instead, it looks like the decision to build a complex had already been made, and consultations carried out after that. Such authoritarian bureaucratic actions are then whitewashed by sporadic visits to count the number of existing “legit” stalls, distribute tokens for new stalls, collect signatures and threaten those protesting against demolition attempts by the corporation with police action.

In this new building model, there is no recognition of the community’s customary ownership of the land and space that was built and occupied in a women-centric way over decades. The proximity of the new market to the previous location masks the violent uprooting, barricading and undermining of the community’s connection to the seashore and to other social groups. The agency of fisherwomen, which is deeply rooted in this location-specific economy, is now at stake under bureaucratic control, making them dependent beneficiaries or ‘illegal encroachers’ in the view of policymakers. Instead of this, it would have been better to upgrade their facilities on an “as is where is” basis, provide clean water and drains to help them maintain a sanitary environment and assign locations that provide all of them equal opportunity for sales, while providing the general public access to the fresh fish that contributes to coastal Chennai’s famous culinary and gastronomic culture.

The Portrayal of Place Through Art: Depictions and Their Disconnect

Ironically, around the same time as the suo moto case, as part of the GCC wall art (Chithiram Pesum) projects like in Kannagi Nagar, the lives and livelihoods of fishermen and women were portrayed on the Nochikuppam housing board walls just opposite to the then-fish market by St+Art Foundation in collaboration with Asian Paints in 2023. While the fishing community and their livelihoods are lauded by the citizens when aesthetically portrayed on walls; in real life, this same community is labelled as “illegal encroachers” and their livelihoods dismissed as “filthy practices” carried out on the seashore. Those praising the art fail to notice the leaking pipes and flowing sewage between the buildings, which the murals mask by shifting the focus away from them. While I was taking pictures of the situation, the busy fish vendors asked me to get a better picture of the leaking pipes. They shared that the pipes had been leaking for the past six months, despite their having raised several complaints about them. This attempt to beautify the city through mural paintings on the housing board walls does not benefit the local communities; instead, it renders them a threat, adding to the complications of their everyday lives.

The construction of the Loop Road, suo moto case to regulate traffic congestion, beautification of the Nochikuppam walls, eviction of the fish market and construction of the modern market are not merely a timeline; they elucidate the gradual accumulation of events in the area that have altered spatial dynamics and ultimately led to the community’s eviction. It is crucial to scrutinise this approach, under which a vision of a “modern” fish market and its developmental and beautification thrust is being imposed on local communities without engaging with them, disregarding their voices, needs and interests, and often tactically maintaining ambiguity until the very end.

*Name changed

Lalitha M is a PhD scholar in Urban Studies at IIT Madras and a Commonwealth Fellow at King’s College London.