More than 11,500 kilos of abandoned, lost or discarded fishing nets, known as ghost nets, were collected in the last three months from the Chennai coast, largely from the Neelankarai-to-Kovalam section. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Tonnes of them are yet to be retrieved from our long coastline, many entangled around marine animals preventing them from moving freely. “In fact, when the North East Monsoon sets in, the quantity of ghost nets being collected also increases depending on the wind pattern seen during the months of October to March. From December onwards, the ghost nets are observed floating closer to the shore,” says Supraja Dharani, founder of TREE Foundation, a Chennai-based non-governmental organisation that focuses on marine conservation. Since 2021, the Foundation has been playing a key role in removing tonnes of ghost nets by empowering different stakeholders attached to the seas, the local community and the fishers being their chief ambassadors. As part of capacity building programmes, they conduct workshops to train fishers in identifying and retrieving a net by steering their boats towards it, looking for marine species in the net, releasing it and pulling the net closer to the boat and bringing it to...