Bhubaneswar, Oct 5: The process to evict illegal prawn gheries spanning across 500 acres began on Tuesday at the Sorana area in Chilika of Khurda district. The 5-day eviction drive is being jointly conducted by Chilika Development Authority (CDA) and the Khurda district administration. It’s stated that all the illegal gheries within the 30km range till Badakula area will be destroyed by the authorities. As the authorities received the information of this illegal business of prawns, immediately a decision was taken to destroy these gheries. Such a step has also been welcomed by the local fishermen community. On Tuesday the operation to evict was done under the presence of District Magistrate with two platoons of police been deployed at the area to prevent any unwanted incident.
Fishermen informed the media that fishing started becoming difficult because of these illegal activities. Whatever, fish seeds are available the mafia used to capture them by building these illegal gheries. Around 50 people used to create a scene and threatened the fishermen with weapons. As a result these outraged fishermen welcomed this initiative as they were losing their livelihood and were being forced to migrate to other state for employment.
The Chilika Tehsildar, Sweta Kumar Das informed that technical people are appointed to track down the gheries and eliminate them which would eventually bring huge losses to those illegal farmers and also would not let any such activity to take place in the future.
