Lives Written in Water: Inside Vidarbha’s Fishing Communities

thenewsdirt
Dec 4, 2025
8 min read

The first light over the Wainganga basin reveals a landscape dotted with water bodies that have shaped human settlement for centuries. In the villages of Bhandara and Gondia districts, men mend nets while women sort the previous day’s catch, their fingers moving with practised efficiency.

These are the fishing communities of Vidarbha, whose relationship with water stretches back further than any written record. Their story is not one of simple subsistence but of engineered lakes, complex social hierarchies, and a constant negotiation with changing ecological and economic currents.

The tanks they fish in were built by their ancestors, yet the right to fish in them has been contested, granted, and redefined through centuries of political upheaval. Today, as they watch indigenous fish species disappear and market dynamics shift, these communities stand at a crossroads between tradition and survival.

The Water Engineers

The history of fishing in Vidarbha begins not with nets but with shovels. Sometime in the sixteenth century, a Gond ruler named Raja Surjabalalsinh travelled to Banaras and returned with a community of people who would transform the region’s geography.

The Kohli community, brought to the forested expanse of what is now eastern Vidarbha, possessed expertise in water management that would create thousands of artificial lakes.

Heer Shah, the ruler’s grandson, issued two farmaans that would define land ownership for generations. The first declared that whoever cleared the forest and established a village would become its Sardar. The second granted ownership of land to those who built tanks and irrigated it. The Kohlis, through their systematic construction of water bodies, became both landowners and managers of an intricate hydraulic system.

These tanks, later termed Ex-Malguzari tanks, numbered in the thousands. The 1901 gazetteer of Bhandara district recorded twelve thousand such water bodies, constructed without formal engineering knowledge yet demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of water retention and distribution.

The Kohli community, now called Malguzars, collected revenue from these tanks while managing them as communal resources. Their jurisdiction extended beyond mere ownership to the creation of a complex water distribution network. A specialised role called Pankar emerged, responsible for carving new channels and allocating water. Transgressions carried stiff penalties. If anyone broke a channel to divert more water to their fields, they faced fines that reinforced the community’s authority over water management.

The British colonial period did not disrupt this system. The Malguzars continued their management, paying revenue to the colonial administration while maintaining traditional control structures. The arrangement persisted until 1951, when the Madhya Pradesh Abolition of Proprietary Rights Act transferred tank ownership to the government.

Vidarbha was then part of Madhya Pradesh, and the transition marked the first significant erosion of the Kohli community’s authority. When Maharashtra state was formed in 1960, the tanks became state property, though the fishing rights remained with the original communities through a new institutional framework.

The Malguzars challenged the imposition of a water cess, taking their case to the Supreme Court and winning the right to irrigate without payment. This victory, however, proved pyrrhic. Without revenue from water users, tank maintenance collapsed, and many water bodies fell into disrepair.

The Invisible Fishers

While the Kohlis engineered the landscape, another community inhabited its lowest tiers. The Dhivar community, known locally as Dheevars, comprised three subcastes with distinct occupations. The Kahar subcaste originally carried palanquins and cultivated water chestnuts.

The Bhoi subcastes are concentrated in western Vidarbha. The Dhivar or Dhimber subsection became the primary fishing community of the region. Their social position remained precarious.

They occupied the lowest rung of village hierarchies, their fishing rights contingent on the goodwill of dominant landowning castes.

Men fished according to landlords’ instructions, receiving a share of the catch as payment. Women carried the fish to weekly markets, converting the perishable harvest into household income. For their own consumption, they fished in rivers and streams, supplementing their diet with small indigenous species.

The abolition of the Malguzari system and the formation of fishing cooperative societies in 1960 altered their status marginally. The Maharashtra state government granted the Dhivar community priority rights over tank fishing through these cooperatives. Each society covered approximately five square kilometres, encompassing two to three villages and multiple tanks. Male community members became shareholders, paying a lease of Rs 450 per hectare annually to the government. After deducting expenses, the society distributed the remaining profits equally among members. In principle, this democratised access.

In practice, old power structures persisted. The Kohli community, now embedded as landed farmers, controlled labour markets and could influence whether Dhivar families received daily wage work under schemes like MGNREGS. One woman from the community articulated this dynamic plainly: “The Kohlis don’t want us to get daily wage work because they need labour for their farms. They have the power to arrange this.”

Traditional fishing methods reflected deep ecological knowledge. The Kampagudu technique involved creating fish habitats using accumulated tree branches. Fishermen would encircle these structures with nets, then churn the water to drive fish out from suffocation before capturing them with dragnets.

The Gaya method, practised during summer when water levels dropped, required thirty to forty-five days of careful water management before harvest.

Hand picking in shallow waters demanded considerable skill, while cast nets (Visuru vala) and dragnets (Lagudu vala) captured different species based on mesh size and operation depth. Hook and line fishing (Galamu) targeted specific species like catfish and murrel, using earthworms, grasshoppers, or small fish as bait. These methods ensured selective harvesting and maintained ecosystem balance.

The Vanishing Catch

The introduction of Indian Major Carps (IMC) in the 1960s marked a turning point. Rohu, Catla, and Mrigal, promoted by the Fisheries Department for higher yields, proved disastrous for indigenous fish populations.

The new species required different fishing techniques. Drag nets replaced traditional selective methods, capturing everything in their path.

Aquatic vegetation, which provided food and shelter for native species, obstructed these nets. The department’s solution introduced another problem: Grass Carp, brought in to control vegetation, destroyed the habitat structure entirely. Indigenous fish populations plummeted as their food sources disappeared. The cumulative impact reduced both biodiversity and fisher incomes.

The market compounded these ecological shifts. IMC fetched only Rs 100-200 per kilogram, while indigenous varieties like Wallago Attu and Puntius sophore commanded Rs 400-500 per kilogram. Yet the latter became increasingly scarce. Fishermen found themselves travelling farther, working harder, and earning less. Some abandoned fishing entirely, their boats destroyed by debt and diminishing returns.

Those who persisted faced labour shortages, compelling them to hire workers from Bihar and Jharkhand. A fisherman from the region explained the economics: trips costing Rs 3-4 lakh sometimes returned empty-handed, leaving families deep in debt. “If even one person dies, his entire family is ruined. There is no help,” he stated, describing the risks of venturing far from shore.

Conservation efforts emerged from within the community. Manish Rajankar, initially a birdwatcher, spent eighteen months observing Patiram Tumsare, an elder from the Dhivar community. “That was the best hands-on training.

I watched Patiram bhau fish, prepare nets, speak with fellow fisherfolk, carry out work in the lake, and negotiate with traders. Everything. That gave me huge insights,” Rajankar recounted. Through his organisation, Bhandara Nisarga Va Sanskriti Abhyas Mandal, they began restoring lakes in 2009. At Nav-talab, they planted indigenous aquatic plants to rebuild habitat. Patiram Tumsare guided the process, explaining that placement mattered as much as species selection.

Women’s self-help groups were formed, enabling members to raise issues in gram sabhas despite opposition from in-laws who feared disruption of labour supply to farms.

The results proved instructive. Lakes where habitat restoration occurred saw fish populations rebound. Indigenous species returned, their quality improving alongside quantity. Market prices for fish from restored lakes increased, as consumers recognised superior taste and nutritional value. The initiative demonstrated that traditional ecological knowledge, combined with scientific monitoring, could reverse decline.

Yet scaling these efforts remained challenging. The Dhivar community comprised only fifteen percent of the Wainganga basin’s population, and their limited political influence constrained resource allocation.

The freshwater ecosystems of Vidarbha support approximately 160 fish species across nine orders, twenty-five families, and eighty genera. Cypriniformes dominates, with Cyprinidae being the most prominent family.

Notable water bodies include the Wardha and Wainganga rivers and reservoirs like Itiadoh and Asolamendha.

Asolamendha Lake alone yielded thirty-two species between June 2010 and May 2012, including catfish and minor carps crucial for local food security. Exotic species like Cyprinus carpio and Oreochromis mossambicus appear in catches but contribute less than native fish.

The potential for fisheries remains substantial, yet realisation depends on management approaches that prioritise biodiversity over short-term yields.

The fishing communities of Vidarbha inhabit a landscape where every water body tells a story of engineered abundance, contested rights, and ecological transformation. Their history reveals how traditional knowledge systems created sustainable livelihoods, how political reconfigurations redistributed access, and how technological interventions disrupted delicate balances. The tanks built by the Kohli community still hold water, but the fish that swim there have changed.

The cooperatives that were meant to empower the Dhivar community have provided limited respite from social and economic marginalisation. Conservation initiatives show promise, yet they remain small islands of restoration in a region where development priorities favour large-scale infrastructure over community-based resource management.

The challenge facing these communities extends beyond fish stocks. It encompasses questions of historical justice, social equity, and ecological sustainability. The Malguzari tanks, once symbols of community enterprise, now represent a complex legacy where ownership and use rights diverge. The Dhivar community, whose labour built and maintained these systems, continues to seek recognition as rightful custodians rather than mere leaseholders. Their traditional methods, dismissed as inefficient by previous development paradigms, increasingly appear as sophisticated adaptations to local conditions.

The future of fishing in Vidarbha may depend on acknowledging this expertise and integrating it into formal management frameworks.

As the sun sets over the lakes of Bhandara and Gondia, fishermen pull in nets that contain fewer fish than their fathers caught, but perhaps more knowledge about what must change. Their children, educated in schools that teach little about local ecology, face choices their ancestors never had. Some will leave for cities, severing ties with water and tradition.

Others may return, armed with new tools and old wisdom, to reclaim their role as stewards of one of India’s most distinctive freshwater landscapes. The water remains, held in tanks built centuries ago, waiting for the next chapter in this long relationship between people and fish.