Buoyant on a predictably good amount of rain during the rest of the monsoon season this year, State Fisheries Department has said that Jharkhand is going to be a self-sufficient State in terms of fish production by year-end itself. It said that the State would be in a position to export fisheries from as early as a couple of years. The department has set a target of 1.40 lakh Metric Ton of fisheries production, which is actual demand of consumption of the state with around 3.29 Crores of population.
This would be a big relief for a State where fish markets used to remain flooded with fisheries from Andhra Pradesh and other coastal areas of the country. “We have trained 4,660 people whom we call Matsya Mitra to produce fish seeds. They have been given a fairly achievable target of producing 232 crores of fish seeds. Each Matsya Mitra has been given a target of defined number of fish seeds to produce according to region and area available for fisheries seeding. With these seeds, we are looking at becoming self sufficient fisheries producing state,” said Director (Fisheries) Rajeev Kumar on Wednesday.
The demand of fish in the State was around 72,000 tonnes in 2001-02. The amount of inflow from neighbouring states was as large as 67,000 tonnes, and State was producing just 5,000 tonnes those days. “We have succeeded to turn the situation other way round. last year, we were able to produce 1.16 lakh tonnes of fish in the State and fell short with only around 26,000 tonnes in fulfilling domestic demand, which stands around 1.40 lakh tonnes annually these days. Once current year target is achieved, we will be a surplus producing state,” he said.
In 2010-11, 80 government fish firms produced 71,886 metric tonnes of fish. The fish seed production increased from 32 Crores to 67 Crores, along with construction of 116 new fish seed hatcheries in private and government sector in 2010-11. Kumar added that the Department took a number of steps to increase fish production in recent past. “We were not using around 1,800 Kms of river length in state properly. This year we focused on around 700 points in different river path where there was no flowing water and was some dobha or pond like patch of water. We used it for fish seed production, so that these provide ample amount of small fishes to rivers when monsoon comes, which would ultimately turn out to be a good supply of fishes,” he said.
Apart from this, the Department got thousands of dobhas exclusively built successfully before monsoon had arrived for fish seed production across the state. Kumar quoted a fish supplier from Andhra Pradesh as saying, “I have been coming to Ranchi to sell fishes for almost 18 years. But now things have completely changed. Supply of local fish is almost matching with that of demand and there is no much space left for people like us in the market. We will have to go out of the market, as supply seems to exceed the demand”.