Justice in Practice: Fisherfolk and Customary Governance in Coastal Tamil Nadu

• RADHA LEKSHMI MANILAL

  Centre for Economic and Social Studies

This article examines customary dispute resolution mechanisms among fisher communities, known as Ur Panchayats (UPs), in the coastal district of Ramanathapuram, Tamil Nadu, to understand access to justice for fisherfolk. UPs are prevalent among the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian fisher communities. Based on Sustainable Development Goal 16.3 (SDG), the study tries to understand how fisherfolk engage with the UPs for different kinds of disputes, how gender, sub-caste, and kinship shape access to these bodies, and whether UPs provide meaningful access to justice in the sense that all community members have the practical capacity to engage with UPs equally. The theoretical framework comprises legal pluralism, developed by Griffiths (1986) and including Moore’s Semi-Autonomous Social Field (SASF) (1973) and Santos’ interlegality (1987), intersectionality, and the capabilities approach. The paper argues that UPs provide accessible customary justice while simultaneously reproducing gender and sub-caste inequalities, exposing the gap between institutional accessibility and substantive access to justice. The study uses a concurrent mixed-methods design. The findings reveal that about 97.5% of fishermen depend on UPs and have, at the same time, undergone transformations in the jurisdiction of fisheries matters. Rather than declining due to institutional pressure from the state, UPs have consolidated their authority in marriage, domestic relations, inheritance, and communal morality. The central finding is that UPs function both as the most practically accessible justice forum for fisherfolk and as sites of structured exclusion for women and sub-caste minorities. The study concludes that achieving SDG 16.3 requires distinguishing institutional legitimacy from institutional justice and building on existing pathways, such as SHG engagement and community-embedded legal literacy, to expand substantive freedoms

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