Pune Students Help Fishermen Earn While Keeping 2800 Litres of Toxic Oil Out of the Sea |
“Whatever we throw into the sea comes back to us on our plate,” says Gaurav Khanvilkar, a 36-year-old fisherman from Devgad in Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg district.
For Gaurav, fishing is not simply work. It shapes the rhythm of daily life along the Konkan coast. Mornings begin early, boats head out before the sun rises, and evenings end with the day’s catch being sorted and sold. Varieties such as surmai (seer fish), pomfret, kingfish, and mackerel form a staple part of local diets, alongside prawns and small crustaceans. For generations, these waters have fed families like his.
At the end of a long day at sea, engine maintenance is routine. Used lubricating oil is drained, collected, and discarded. For years, nobody paused to ask where it went next.
An invisible threat had been building in the background in the form of used lubricating oil from fishing boat engines. Thick, black, and toxic, used lubricating oil from fishing boat engines was routinely dumped into the sea or sold cheaply to scrap dealers. There were no collection facilities, no clear disposal systems, and little awareness of the damage it caused.
“I had seen people throw it directly into the sea, especially when they had large quantities. At that time, nobody explained the harm it was doing to the water, the fish, or to us,” Gaurav recalls.
Across landing centres in Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg, about a third of fishing vessels were involved in such practices, amounting to nearly two to three lakh litres of used oil entering the sea every year.
Marine life was among the first to suffer from this pollution. Oil formed a film on the water’s surface, damaged algae and plankton, harmed juvenile fish and shellfish, and eventually travelled up the food chain. For fishing communities, the danger circled back to their own plates and their own health.
For Gaurav and his peers, it was an invisible danger, harming both their health and their livelihood.
Two researchers, Shruti Ghag (29) and Pooja Sathe (30), were already familiar with these waters. Both grew up in coastal communities and had studied fisheries and environmental science before joining the Centre for Sustainable Development at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune.
“The landing centres were familiar spaces for us,” Shruti explains. “We knew the fishermen and their routines. When we saw used oil being dumped, the problem did not feel alien to us.”
Their first task was observation. They visited landing centres, watched disposal practices, and spoke to fishermen, often delicately, as no one was willing to admit........