Kerala’s influential Latin Catholic Church on Sunday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit the fishing villages affected by Cyclone Ockhi on the coasts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu even as the death toll in the State in the disaster rose to 42.
However, relief also trickled in as more than 200 fishermen, who had gone for fishing before the cyclone broke out and had been trapped in the choppy Arabian Sea since then, returned to the coast on Sunday.
The Church observed Sunday as a Prayer Day with special Mass, prayers and other rites in the churches in Thiruvananthapuram for those killed and had gone missing in the cyclone. The biggest crowd of believers from the fishing community for Mass and prayers was seen at the St Thomas Church in Poonthura from where a large number of fishermen were missing.
The Coast Guard on Sunday found the bodies of two fishermen who had gone missing in the cyclone. While one body was found 120 nautical miles off Vizhinjam in Thiruvananthapuram, the other was found near the Vypeen coast in Kochi. With this, the death toll in Ockhi in Kerala rose to 42. As per informal estimates, over 200 Kerala fishermen’s are yet to return from the sea.
A pastoral letter read out on Sunday at the churches of the Latin Catholic Church, to which most of the cyclone-affected fishermen’s in Thiruvananthapuram belonged, also called for the constitution of an independent Fisheries Ministry in the Centre. Presently, the Fisheries Department is one of the several departments coming under the Agriculture Ministry.
“We request the Central Government that the disaster brought about by Cyclone Ockhi should be declared a national calamity considering its intensity and magnitude and that the Prime Minister should visit the tragedy-affected people and places (in the Kerala and Tamil Nadu coastal regions) for making a direct evaluation,” the pastoral letter said.
The letter, issued on behalf Archbishop M Soosa Pakiam of Thiruvananthapuram Archdiocese of the Latin Church, asked the Centre to take immediate steps for installing permanent systems aimed at averting such tragedies in the future. It wanted the Kerala and Central Governments to intensify the efforts to find the fishermen who had gone missing in the cyclone.
“We also want the process of relief and rehabilitation of the cyclone-affected people to be expedited,” the letter said. It also urged all the fishermen in the Thiruvananthapuram area to join the protest march being taken out to the Kerala Raj Bhavan on Monday under the leadership of the Church.
Sunday also saw protests continuing in the fishing hamlets on the coast of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. More than 3,000 people including fisherwomen and children formed a human chain in the sea on the Kanyakumari coast in Tamil Nadu demanding intensification of efforts to rescue the fishermen trapped in the sea and hike in the relief assistance.
Meanwhile, 207 fishermen’s including 27 from Kerala, who had gone to the sea in long-line operating boats for fishing before the cyclone and had somehow been able to take refuge in Lakshadweep, returned to Kochi in 18 boats on Sunday with the help of the Navy which has been leading the search and rescue operations for the past ten days.
They said they had seen bodies floating in the sea and that they had witnessed the destruction of ten boats in the cyclone. “We saw four dead bodies but these were not in a condition to be fished out of the water.
The bodies had decayed that much and were unidentifiable,” said a fisherman. They also said that they knew a minimum of 30 boats had gone missing.
A total of 217 long-line-operation boats had gone to sea from the Thoppumpady fishing harbor in Kochi before the cyclone. Several of these boats had reached the coasts of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka. However, clear information is yet to come about the fate of the remaining boats and the fishermen in them, according to leaders of fishermen’s associations.