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KARACHI: The Maritime Security Agency has caught 31 Indian fishermen along with their 14 boats while fishing well inside the Pakistan waters.
In a statement issued here on Sunday, the MSA said that the Indian fishermen were caught on Saturday about “110 nautical miles inside the Pakistan’s exclusive economic zone”.
Sources said that usually fishermen were caught just a few nautical miles inside the other country’s waters, but the Indian fishermen caught on Saturday safely intruded about 110 nautical miles inside the Pakistan waters, which exposed the inefficiency of all border security forces concerned.
India and Pakistan share the Arabian Sea and have their border at the Sir Creek, which has not yet been demarcated and remains a disputed territory.
Since it is in the Indus delta which is rich in marine resources, including various commercially important fish species, so fishermen from both countries go there to fish and in the absence of the clearly demarcated borders usually stray into the other country’s area.
Fishermen are caught and brought to land, tried and put into jails and after they serve their sentences, they are sent back to their homes. Their stay in the hostile jails may stretch from a few months to several years and in some cases over decades.
Recently, Pakistan had released 180 Indian fishermen after they completed their prison sentences. Over 300 others are still languishing in jails here and over 100 fishing boats of the Indian fishermen are also being held here. Similarly a large number of Pakistani fishermen with their fishing boats are in Indian custody also.
Fishermen leaders here have been demanding that India and Pakistan declare roughly a 100-kilometres buffer zone —50 kilometres on each side of the border — and after joint verification issue permits to each other’s fishermen so that they could fish in the border area and if caught could be immediately identified by the border security forces and were not arrested.
Another proposal by fishermen representatives is that since India had an agreements with its other two neighbours — Sri Lanka and Bangladesh — with which it also shares the sea that whenever they catch fishermen of the other country who stray into their waters, they do not arrest the fishermen but confiscate their catch to tell them to return to their respective countries.
