EVERYDAY LOCAVORES
"We have always lived on these islands and gone to sea. How can the state say it does not belong to us?”
—S. Pandiammal, 44, Rameswaram
By Rashmi Sridar (text) and Revathi Sunil (photographs)
11 August 2026
A resident of Chinnapalam, a village in Tamil Nadu’s Rameswaram, S. Pandiammal, 44, starts her day at 5 am. She cleans and cooks before her husband S. Selvaraj returns from fishing. She spends two hours collecting the crabs he harvested and also disentangles nets. “The first time I went into the sea, I was eight years old… I felt like vomiting. You get used to it, but I never liked it,” she shares.
Located along the northern Gulf of Mannar, women of Chinnapaalam have historically fished and collected seaweed. “This is the only village where both men and women go to fish,” Pandiammal says. When the region was declared a marine-protected area in 1989, the livelihoods of small fishers, especially the women, were affected. “We have always lived on these islands and gone to sea. How can the state say it does not belong to us?” This injustice motivated her to join the Ramanathapuram Fishers Union when she was 22 to advocate for Chinnapaalam’s fishers’ right to the seas.
The Union now has over 4,200 members—1,809 are women—and has demanded state licences for its seaweed collectors. Without licenses, earnings, already precarious due to volatile climate events, are further jeopardised. Pandiammal recognises the disproportionate impact on women fishers, who also bear the burden of domestic work, and addresses urgent concerns faced by women to the panchayat. “In June, we met the fisheries minister to close the [alcohol] shop [owned by the state government],” Pandiammal says. “Men waste all their earnings on liquor, and women have to earn and take care of children.”
Pandiammal has no illusions about the security of fish work. “I had decided that my sons won’t fish. So one teaches while the other is a supervisor in a crab factory. There is no fish in the sea and the next generation needs permanent salaries. They have to study.”
Yet, in the village, even graduates struggle to find jobs and return to fishing. “There is a need for our people in the fisheries and forest department jobs. Right now, if we need any scheme approvals or support, we have to wait for signatures from the officials. Would we have to if [officials were from the community]?” she questions.
Pandiammal taking children from Chinnapaalam to a library in nearby Pamban.
Pandiammal spends hours every week collecting her husband’s harvest of blue swimmer crabs, red crabs, and mud crabs.
Women of the village not only bear the burden of fish work and domestic chores, but also play a key role in mobilising for fisher rights. “When there is a protest, it is the women who spend money to go in buses and autos. The police have sometimes locked us up in convention halls,” Pandiammal shares.
Pandiammal and village leaders at the Ramanathapuram Collectorate. When elected as a panchayat ward member for her community work, Pandiammal directed resources to building houses for 10 fisher families. “They were living in the village commons without land pattas for over 40-50 years.”
Rashmi Sridar, a teacher in a school in coastal Chennai, noticed how environmental changes and overfishing affected her students’ lives. Since then, she has travelled along Tamil Nadu’s coast to understand these challenges more deeply. Trained in Geographical Information System (GIS) and environmental law, she hopes to work with fishing communities to map their resources, with a focus on women’s labour, seafood markets, and collective action.
Revathi Sunil is a Bengaluru-based filmmaker, writer, and editor working across documentary and fiction. She is interested in intimate, non-intrusive storytelling that centres dignity, complexity, and the perspectives of those furthest from the frame. Revathi is drawn to stories at the intersection of gender, caste, and labour, particularly the lives of women and vulnerable communities whose work remains invisible to dominant narratives. Her practice is rooted in a critical and political understanding of art, shaped by her own position, privilege, and relation to the world.
Editors: Oishika Roy and Shreya Bansal
Copy Editor: Khorshed Deboo
The Woman Farmer Project is a multimedia storytelling initiative led by The Locavore in partnership with the Doc Society Climate Story Unit. It aims to build a roadmap for successful collaborations between storytellers, grassroots organisations, and community distribution networks across India for impactful climate storytelling.
The purpose of the Doc Society Climate Story Unit is to support transformative storytelling in order to advance a climate-just and biodiverse future. Their mission is to rewild the mainstream, planting seeds of narrative that envision better futures for all while cultivating the ecosystem to support it.
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