Sri Lanka on Sunday urged India to “expeditiously” end unsustainable industrial-scale fishing in the coastal waters between the two countries.

Addressing presspersons here a day after both sides agreed to set up a Joint Working Group on the fishermen issue, a member of the Sri Lankan Parliament, M.A. Sumanthiran, said Indian trawlers were using heavy-duty fishing techniques in the coastal waters that must be ended at the “earliest”.

“Both sides made significant progress in the talks [held on November 5] that were led by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Sri Lankan counterpart Mangala Samaraweera. We agreed that the Joint Working Group would have three tasks — of expeditiously working to end bottom trawling, facilitating joint patrolling of the coastal waters, and working towards release of arrested fishermen who strayed into each other’s waters,” Mr. Sumanthiran said.

Mr. Sumanthiran, who represents the Illankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK) in Sri Lanka’s Tamil-dominated northern province of Jaffna, said the agreement on the three-point agenda of the JWG would help end the long-standing issue of fishing in the coastal waters between the two countries. Apart from Mr. Sumanthiran and the two Foreign Ministers, the meeting on Saturday was attended by Sri Lankan Minister for Fisheries Mahinda Amaraweera and Union Minister of State for Road Transport, Highways and Shipping Pon Radhakrishnan and Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh.

-The Hindu
-Agencies