For India's Traditional Fishermen, Cellphones Deliver a Sea Change

At 5:30 a.m., Rajan's cellphone rang for the first of dozens of times that day. Rajan pulled it out of his breast pocket, where he keeps it at the end of a red cord around his neck, in a plastic protective case. The captain of another boat cutting through the dark sea, visible only by its red and green running lights, was calling to plot strategy.

The skippers agreed that they would steam about 14 miles offshore, where Rajan's crew had landed almost $2,000 worth of sardines two days earlier, a great catch. In a flurry of calls, Rajan and other skippers were all clearly worried because yesterday had been a disaster. After 12 hours at sea under a broiling sun, nobody had caught enough sardines to make a decent lunch for a cat.

"I can't imagine life without my phone," said Rajan, who has curly hair, a graying beard and a body hardened by work. Before cellphones, he said, he couldn't communicate with other boat captains. Few of them could afford expensive marine radios, so if someone hit upon a massive school of sardines, there was no way to alert friends on other boats.

And if the boat broke down, as they frequently do, Rajan said he'd have to wait at sea and hope that help happened along. Now he can call his mechanic, who also carries a cellphone, to ask for emergency service. And if the crew has a family emergency on shore, the news arrives instantly -- as it did a week ago when a crewman's father-in-law died suddenly.

"We should have had this power a long time ago," Rajan said, as a pink-orange sunrise peeked through the clouds.

After nine hours at sea, at 1:44 p.m., Rajan was ready to give up for the day. The wind was kicking up a choppy sea, making it hard to spot the ripples and sparkles made by schools of sardines. Then, from his perch high in the bow, he spotted them about 50 yards away. He jumped up and down and shouted to the crew members, who scrambled to their places.

The crewman at the wheel pushed the throttle all the way forward, and the Andavan kicked into high gear, making a huge circle around the fish. Crewmen played out the net from the stern, where it had been neatly packed. The net has floats at the top and weights at the bottom. Once it's set around the fish, the crewmen use a winch to close it like a giant purse. The crew then hauls in the net and the fish inside by hand -- a process that can take hours.

Eyeing the six-inch fish flailing against the net, Rajan could see he had a decent catch, on the small side of average. As they hauled the net, the delighted crew sang a work song, whose refrain in Hindi meant, "Together we can do this."

Rajan's phone rang a half-dozen times in a half-hour, with calls from dealers in different ports, buyers and other boat captains. Rajan talked quickly and kept hauling. When most of the net was in, the crew used small nets to scoop the fish from the water and dump them into the 45-foot open boat that is towed behind the Andavan.

By 3 p.m., the open boat was loaded with fish and the Andavan turned toward port, an hour away. Standing on the deck soaked with sweat, Rajan started returning phone calls. He dialed the number of the wholesale agent at his home port, who offered about $13 for each 110-pound box of fish -- about 12 cents a pound.

Rajan agreed to the deal. He said if his load had been bigger and it had been earlier in the day, he would have called around to check prices at other ports. But he said for a smallish load late in the day, the first price offered was fair. And he said the dealer was forced to offer a decent price, knowing that Rajan could still go elsewhere. As insurance, Rajan returned the call of the other dealer who had called him, just to keep good relations for another day.

Rajan said that without his phone, his catch might have gone to waste. Because he called ahead to the port, buyers there knew that he was coming, what kind of fish he had and the size of his catch. In the past, Rajan said, he would sometimes arrive at port late in the day only to find that all the buyers had gone home, unaware that another boat was coming. His catch would go unsold, and he and his crew would go unpaid.

"Even if it takes us one or two hours to get there, they will still be waiting for us," Rajan said, smoking a cigarette on the Andavan's deck. "It was never like that before."

At least 100 people were waiting on the dock when the Andavan arrived. Workers in bright orange shirts hustled into the 45-foot boat and, standing knee-deep in silvery sardines, began scooping tens of thousands of fish into plastic milk crates and tossing them onto the wharf. Buyers -- women in long dresses, men in lungi -- crammed in tight to buy fish, passing cash to the wholesale agent, who recorded each sale in a notebook.

Rajan and his crew had landed just under 1,800 pounds of fish -- better than the previous day's washout, but barely one-tenth the size of their haul two days earlier. Even technology can't make the sea predictable, Rajan said. The fish brought $220, which barely paid for the crew and the diesel. But Rajan said it was probably twice what he might have earned for the same catch in the days before cellphones.

And, he said, counting soggy bills on the wharf, the fishing is always better tomorrow.