On April 24, 2024, at the crowded Muscat International Airport, 39-year-old Selvakumar (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) stood alone. It was his longest stay on land since he left India in a fishing vessel called Rosy in December 2023. His disheveled clothing and beaten duffel bag stood in stark contrast to the airport’s carefully curated waiting area, where life-size artificial date palms tried to conjure order and luxury.
He was dropped off at the airport that afternoon by his handlers with a mere $32 and an aching back in need of medical attention. Forlorn and with an empty stomach, Selvakumar found little appeal in his surroundings. Yet he spent $18 on a packet of chocolates to take home. A father couldn’t go home empty-handed. For himself, he bought a soft drink for $4, the cheapest item he could find.
Later that night, Selvakumar boarded his three-hour flight to Mumbai, where he exchanged the $10 he had left. After deductions, it came to around 650 rupees. It was all he had earned from slaving for five months at sea. From there, he flew to Chennai.
With the money, he took a bus to his wife and two children in the ancient coastal village of Poompuhar in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Over the next few months, more than 70 fishers followed in his footsteps. They were drawn by promises of higher pay and a better life amid an economic crisis at home, triggered by a local ban on purse seine net fishing. This technique targets open-water species such as sardines, mackerel and tuna using a wall of netting and a drawstring that pulls it together to seal fish in like a purse.
Unbeknownst to the fishers in pursuit of a better life abroad, they had become part of a transnational illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing operation, an exclusive New Lines investigation has found. The sophisticated operation involved transporting them to Oman on five mechanized Indian fishing vessels that flew the flag of Belize, carefully avoiding Sri Lankan waters and using Palau-issued sailor passports for the fishers, who were then employed to illegally fish in Omani waters.
“We heard someone was looking for labor to work in a fishing fleet in Oman,” said Senthil (whose name has been changed at his request to protect his identity). He is another fisher from Poompuhar, who was also on the vessel Rosy. “We knew it wouldn’t be easy work, but we had no idea they were taking us to work illegally,” he told New Lines in person.
In 2023, when fishers in Poompuhar were presented with the offer of going to Oman, the village was in particularly dire straits. The 2020 ban on purse seine net fishing — after a conflict between the predominantly labor-owned purse seine outfits and commercial fisheries that operated trawlers — affected an estimated 1.5 million fishers across nine of the 14 coastal districts in Tamil Nadu.
The town of 10,000 residents lost everything in the process, and the unemployed fishers, banished from the seas, were forced to migrate and find work elsewhere. That was when men like Selvakumar, his brother Muthuraja and others set out for Oman.
Despite being a relatively well-off coastal state with a long shoreline, Oman’s fisheries sector remains underdeveloped. It contributes just 1% of the country’s $73.08 billion gross domestic product. The country has only a handful of fishing harbors and relies on artisanal fishing, which uses outdated methods and vessels. The industry also faces a labor shortage, since few Omanis pursue fishing as a livelihood.
Back in India, it was in another village located along the coastline of Poompuhar, dependent on purse seine fishing and facing dire conditions, that the lure of overseas work first set in. (New Lines is withholding the name of the village to protect the identities of its residents.) A middle-aged purse seine fisher was approached through a mutual friend with a business proposition in the summer of 2023.
“A businessman from Tharangambadi was looking to buy preowned purse seine fishing vessels to take to Oman,” he told New Lines in person. With hundreds of purse seine vessels bought on credit and left in limbo after the purse seine ban, the supply was more than enough. “I was offered a 1% commission on the sale of boats,” said the fisher, a former captain of a purse seine fleet and trusted by the villagers.
Using his contacts, he facilitated the purchase of five used purse seine vessels that were renamed, repainted and refurbished by the entrepreneur. They were rebranded with “Royal Fisheries” written in red, along with an ornate crown in yellow — indicating their apparent connection with the Sultanate of Oman. Fishing nets and the small fiberglass boats accompanying the vessels were also bought cheaply.
When the former purse seine captain was offered a job in Oman leading one of the vessels there, he accepted immediately. Before long, he shuttered his travel business, sold off his vehicles, paid pending loans and started dreaming of earning in Omani rials. “I thought it was the right thing to secure my family’s future,” he said. But today, it is his biggest regret.
In December 2023, Senthil, Selvakumar, Muthuraja and the former purse seine captain found themselves among over 70 fishers aboard a fleet they were told consisted of five Omani fishing vessels leaving from India for the sultanate, they explained to New Lines in person. They would later learn that they were being trafficked into an illegal fishing operation. “The boats did not have valid licenses or permits to fish in Oman,” Selvakumar said.
They were promised a salary of 1,000 rupees ($11) per day during the voyage from India to Oman, along with 40% of the catch to be shared among them. “We paid money, too,” Selvakumar said. The fishers claimed that each of them paid $450 to $1,150 to intermediaries for facilitating the opportunity, in addition to $250 for the Emigration Check Not Required endorsement, a passport annotation indicating exemption from emigration checks, commonly obtained for sailors, who are subject to more relaxed regulatory oversight and immigration rules than fishers.
But in this case, the men weren’t sailors, as their documents falsely claimed. They were fishers being trafficked under the pretense of maritime work as sailors, and they were in Omani waters to fish illegally. They were also handed Continuous Discharge Certificates (CDCs) — seafarer identity documents — issued not by India but by Palau, a Pacific island nation with a population of just 18,000. Sailors are permitted to apply for CDCs from foreign registries, and the Palau International Ship Registry, which issues them, bills itself as the “fastest growing ship registry in the world.”
The certified crew list of the vessel Rosy, which was shared with New Lines by a fisher onboard the vessel, contained information on the 12 crew members. It had details of passports and corresponding CDC numbers, but none of the 11 Palau CDCs could be independently verified. The Indian CDC could be verified and belonged to one Ranjith Prasad Singh, who was mentioned as a marine technician in the Rosy crew list.
The fishing vessels were registered under the flag of Belize. The country is regarded as a flag of convenience, a common shipping industry practice in which owners register vessels in jurisdictions with lax or nominal oversight. By international convention, vessels must fly the flag of their country of registration, and there are no restrictions on which countries can host a registry; even landlocked states can maintain one.
Documents reviewed by New Lines show that the fishing vessel Rosy carried a Certificate of Belize registry classified under “special registrations,” which is valid for single trips during three months, letting owners skirt stricter regulations while keeping their operations legally afloat.
Belize, with a population of just 410,000, is on the blacklist of countries deemed “high or very high risk” for vessel detections under the Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control, which monitors enforcement of shipboard living and working conditions. Studies have found that vessels flying flags of convenience are disproportionately involved in IUU fishing and are more likely to engage in transshipment, a practice that involves transfer of catch, supplies or crew at sea, often to bypass legal oversight.
In September 2024, nine months after leaving India, and three months after docking at the fishing harbor in the Omani city of Duqm, a fisher who gave his pseudonym as Arivarusan approached the cabin of the vessel Rosy as popular Tamil music played loudly.
His longest stretches on land during those few months were brief trips to the dock. From a small shop there — run by a Bangladeshi expatriate — the boat would stock up on groceries, bought on credit extended to his handlers, Royal Fisheries. It was at the dock, he later recalled to New Lines, that he learned that without papers and a visa, his presence, like that of his fellow fishers, was illegal and punishable by law.
A new phone that Arivarusan had carried with him held sparse proof of his misfortunes — mostly selfies — dating back to December 2023, when he and the others set off from their village. The photos helped the New Lines investigation to retrace and corroborate the fishers’ ordeal.
The fishing vessels had left from Karaikal, a port city in India’s federally administered region of Puducherry on the Bay of Bengal, the former purse seine captain told New Lines. The fishers then boarded the boats at Kunthukal Harbour, a small fishing harbor in Tamil Nadu, in the southeastern corner of India, about 90 miles from Karaikal and near the narrow strait that separates India from Sri Lanka. Given that the strait occupies this strategic point in India’s maritime geography, the vessels had to maneuver several choke points on their way to Kunthukal. Vessels here are closely watched by both Indian and Sri Lankan forces as they avoid international waters.
However, according to Global Fishing Watch — an open-access platform backed by nonprofits Oceana and SkyTruth as well as Google that allows users to monitor commercial fishing activity worldwide in near-real time — the vessel’s Automatic Identification System (AIS), which enables it to be tracked, was switched off or untraceable until it docked at the Tuticorin seaport, a busy harbor on India’s southeastern coast, roughly 120 miles north of the country’s southernmost point at Kanyakumari.
They were eventually stuck in Thoothukudi for two months, unable to produce the necessary paperwork to get clearance from authorities. The fishers were unaware of what was transpiring behind the scenes or how the vessels were seeking to leave. The vessels were navigated by northern Indians, who spoke in Hindi, a language the fishers did not understand, they told New Lines. (The fishers spoke and understood Tamil.) After they left, they were held up at Mangaluru and Goa — both on the western coast of India — for many days. More fishers had joined them in Goa.
The Rosy crew list produced at Thoothukudi harbor and inspected by New Lines shows just 12 members, all of whom were declared as marine technicians. But fishers onboard claim there were at least 15 to 18 fishers in each boat, with the handler joining them in Oman after traveling by air.
A clearance certificate, issued by the port authorities at Thoothukudi for the fishing vessel Rosy and reviewed by New Lines, revealed that the five vessels, along with half a dozen or more fiberglass boats and fishing nets, were declared as newly constructed exports. The paper listed Royal Fishery Company SPC, a Muscat-based firm, as the buyer. However, in reality, they were old and refurbished vessels.
Old vessels should be registered with the authorities and have country of origin certificates at the time of export. However, since they likely lacked the proper documentation — perhaps due to the purse seine vessel ban — they were exported under the pretense of being new.
Exports of fishing vessels are a tiny and unusual slice of India’s foreign trade, occurring only rarely. Yet in 2023, most exports of fishing vessels from India were to Oman. These were worth $400,000 according to the World Integrated Trade Solution, an online platform that compiles global trade and tariff data from the World Bank, World Trade Organization and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Between September 2023 and August 2024, 24 companies were active in importing boat hulls to Oman, with the Muscat-based Royal Fishery Company SPC emerging as the largest, responsible for 38% of the total through 12 shipments. Most of these Indian exports originated from a single supplier: Uma Ship Builder and Repairs Private Limited, according to Volza, an online platform that tracks international trade flows and company-level import-export data. New Lines reached out to Royal Fishery Company SPC for comment, but did not receive a response.
However, Uma Ship Builder and Repairs, based in Tharangambadi, Tamil Nadu — a former Danish settlement — claims to be an exporter of enamel paint, chopped strand mat and fishing nets. Even though it is an active company according to Indian government records, when New Lines inspected its official address, there was only an abandoned house, Uma Cottage. (The business owner who showed up in the former purse seine captain’s village looking to buy preowned purse seine fishing vessels to take to Oman also hails from this town.)
Selvakumar said that once they traveled through Indian waters into international waters, the names of the boats were painted white and their flags changed to that of Oman. According to International Maritime Organization rules, vessels must keep their AIS transponders — a radio-based tracking system — switched on at all times. Yet the five vessels traveling from India to Oman intermittently turned off their transponders to avoid detection, fishers onboard later told New Lines. Their statements were corroborated using open-source tracking data.
“The Indian Ocean region has the fewest Regional Fisheries Management Organizations,” said Pooja Bhatt, an associate professor at the Jindal School of International Affairs, referring to the international bodies that manage and regulate fishing in different parts of the world’s oceans. “It makes it amongst the least governed areas. Since it is a vast area with minimal governance and oversight, there are more attempts at IUU fishing.”
Hence, the security risk to trafficked Indian fishers is high. They might be arrested and are at risk of being abandoned by their traffickers, left stranded at sea for months without the means to return home. According to the International Transport Workers’ Federation, Indian sailors were the world’s most abandoned group in 2024, followed by Syrians and Ukrainians. (The issue is largely confined to the world’s merchant navy fleets, and there is scant information about fishers in these waters.)
The dire conditions while at sea have driven fishers to extreme measures. In an unrelated incident in February 2025, three Tamil fishers had escaped Oman in a stolen dhow and sailed across the Arabian Sea to Karnataka, a state in southwestern India. They, too, worked for an Oman-based fish trader but left due to alleged irregular wage payments. Upon reaching India, they surrendered to the coastguard, which intercepted the Omani dhow and took the men into custody.
Similar tensions had brewed among the fishers on the Rosy over nonpayment of salaries upon reaching Oman in April 2024. They had not been paid for the four months they spent at sea.
According to the 2006 Maritime Labour Convention, seafarers must be paid at least once a month. Crew members owed two months’ pay or more, or those deprived of adequate food, water or fuel, are considered abandoned. Such cases would usually prompt action by the insurers of the vessel and the ship’s flag state — in this instance, Belize.
“We caught around 350 tonnes during my time there,” said Senthil, who returned to India in October 2024. Selvakumar told New Lines that Omani fishing boats would come to take the catch. Such sales were conducted at night, he said, and their dues were never settled amicably by the Indian handlers. The undercutting and nonpayment of salaries deepened suspicion and mistrust among the fishers, which compounded the hardships of illegal fishing.
Cheated and trapped, the fishers had no choice but to remain in Oman. “We went to many fishing ports in Oman,” Senthil recalled, including Salalah, Muscat, Duqm and Sur. “Sometimes authorities were watching, and we’d end up anchored mid-sea or near uninhabited islands for long stretches to avoid detection.” Without a valid license to fish or sell the catch, they relied on vessels bringing diesel and supplies every 10 to 15 days while hiding, the fishers said.
Rationing onboard was harsh. “We were each given 10 liters of water for 10 days,” Selvakumar said. After making their way along Oman’s coast, the fleet eventually settled at Duqm fishing harbor, near the newly developed special economic zone at Duqm, home to Oman’s largest deep-water fishing port. New Lines confirmed that an account for Royal Fisheries existed at the shop at Duqm fishing harbor.
They continued to fish at night, Muthuraja said. Whenever inspections loomed, fishing nets were moved from the boats to a parking lot in Duqm, Senthil added. “Each loading and unloading takes three hours. That became a work in itself, and that was done in the dark or early hours,” he explained. It was back-breaking work.
“They sent me away as I created problems,” Selvakumar said, reflecting on his eventual exit. He had injured his back while fishing and needed medical assistance, and he alleged that he was denied hospital care. When he asked to return home, his requests were repeatedly delayed. “We were told that only after they recover all the money would we be allowed to go back,” he said.
The vessel kept trying to avoid detection by mooring at sea and hiding in bays. “We were loitering around to avoid getting caught. It was like being in a jail. I realized we had been lied to and deceived every day,” Selvakumar said. As his condition worsened, he refused to work. Support from fellow fishers finally forced the handlers to arrange his return home.
Four months after leaving India, Selvakumar was finally dropped off at Muscat’s airport and handed the papers he needed to exit Oman. They included a transit visa that listed Khimji Ramdas Shipping LLC as his sponsor. The 150-year-old company, founded in 1870 by the Indian-origin Khimji family, had a net worth estimated at $900 million in 2015. Its businesses span construction, manufacturing, restaurants, car dealerships, supermarkets, shipping, insurance, travel agencies, real estate and schools in Oman.
When New Lines reached out to the company for a statement, its spokesperson denied any involvement in IUU fishing activities. “For your kind information, we are part of a reputed business conglomerate with 150 years of existence in Oman. We do not encourage or support any activity that is not legal,” the spokesperson said. But they acknowledged that, in the past, they had acted as agents for Royal Fishery Company SPC’s vessels in the Omani port.
Back in India, Selvakumar is grateful to be home again. “I am just lucky to have come back,” he said. Others followed suit in batches. While Arivarusan was paid $114 six months after his return, even though he was owed at least $3,000, Senthil was paid $1,076 in multiple installments, which was supposed to be shared with other fishers as well, he added.
“I was a fool to get coaxed by the offers,” said the former purse seine captain who coordinated the initial sale of the vessels, reflecting on the entire ordeal. “I am owed at least $8,000,” he said. Despite the sense of having been scammed by an illegal fishing operation, Selvakumar found that many of his neighbors in the village were gearing up to make the same trip, scraping together savings and making bigger deposits to go to Oman. “Let them do what they want,” he said, clearly irritated.
Yet when New Lines last spoke to him in June 2025, he was back in Oman, catching fish illegally once again as part of the same fleet. “They paid a part of what they owed me, but some payments are still pending,” he said.
Other fishers have also returned in search of new opportunities on illegal fishing vessels. “I have to stock up on diesel and supplies,” said Arivarusan, explaining why he couldn’t meet me for an interview. “I am working on a boat which is headed to Sri Lanka for the next two weeks,” he added. This time, he said, the illicit activity will unfold in Sri Lankan waters.
Become a member today to receive access to all our paywalled essays and the best of New Lines delivered to your inbox through our newsletters.