<p>The paper begins with a question of why alternative livelihoods are being promoted among the small-scale fishers in Palk Bay, Tamil Nadu, and what political work these interventions perform. The paper challenges the idea that the rationale behind these programs was poverty alleviation and ecological conservation, but argues that they function as a technical fix designed by improvement organisations to obscure the state’s failure to regulate environmentally destructive trawling and unregulated shrimp aquaculture, sectors that are central to India’s blue economy ambitions. Rather than treating fishers as passive recipients of state-led development, the paper foregrounds their ambivalent responses as expressions of political subjectivity and spatial claim-making. It contends that the reluctance to embrace alternative livelihoods is not rooted in economic irrationality or cultural conservatism, but in a deeper imperative to remain active agents in the production of marine space—a space increasingly reorganised by the intersecting logics of capital, conservation, and state control. By critically engaging with the political rationale of the state and the counter-rationalities of the small-scale fishers, the paper contributes to the Blue Justice scholarship in the Global South.</p>