MUMBAI: THE Centre plans to set up an aquaculture authority and a high power committee for strengthening the fisheries sector to meet the challenges of the WTO regime, agriculture minister Ajit Singh said on Thursday.
"The National Agriculture Policy would enable the farm sector including fisheries to meet the challenges stemming from economic liberalisation and globalisation particularly in the context of the World Trade Organisation," he said in his address at the sixth convocation of the Central Institute of Fisheries Education.
Some of the critical areas that required immediate attention were increasing population, deteriorating condition of aquatic eco-system, environmental pollution, loss of bio-diversity and implications of the intellectual property rights in harnessing new science, the minister said.
Singh said there was a need to evolve scientific policies and legal framework for coastal and open sea aquaculture, particularly with respect to carrying capacity of coastal and marine ecosystems of different areas.
All this called for a new comprehensive Indian Fisheries Act to be brought after the stock of changes that have taken place in the recent years, he said.
In less than three decades, the aquaculture activity had been transferred from a traditional activity to a major industry providing hundreds of jobs and billions of dollars of export.
Scientists working at Fisheries Research Institutes under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (Icar) were responsible for this transition, he opined.
Mr Singh regretted that despite women playing an important role in pre-harvest and post-harvest operations in the fisheries sector, they had not been given due recognition.
In the emerging scenario of fisheries and aquaculture development, women have a much larger role to play, he opined. The point of major focus in fisheries extension, training and education programmes should be to improve the status of fisherwomen and promotion of alternative income generating activities, he said.
Supply of input subsidies to groups of fisherwomen for setting up processing units through state fisheries departments or women development departments was under the active consideration of his government, Mr Singh said.
In his presidential address, Panjab Singh, director general of Icar said annual fish production had increased 0.8m tonnes in '50-51 to 5.7m tonnes in '00-01. Besides, the contribution of the fisheries sector to the Gross Domestic Product had shown a 25 times increase from Rs 921 crore in '80-81 to Rs 22,223 crore in '98-99 at current prices.
India ranked fourth in the world in total fish production and second in aquaculture production, only next to China, Panjab Singh said. Sustainability of development of aquaculture would largely depend on promotion of environment-friendly farming practices.
The proposed aquaculture authority would play a major role in promoting this sector by enacting a legislation to regulate brackish water aquaculture in the country, he said.
SC Mukherjee, director Central Institute of Fisheries Education (Cife), said his organisation has so far trained 4,200 students, including 120 from Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Kenya, Laos, Nigeria, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey, Yemen, Vietnam, Myanmar, Eritria and Syria.
He said for the first time new courses had been introduced by Cife. These include courses in fish genetics and biotechnology, nutrition and biochemistry, pathology and microbiology and post-harvest technology.
Cife had played the role of a policy centre in fisheries through organisation of constant interactions with farmers, teachers and researchers by conducting different programmes, he said.
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