Native fish from drying canals and beels fill Dhaka's Dayaganj market as fishers worry

In the early hours at Dayaganj market in Dhaka at the start of November 2025, baskets were piled with shol, taki, magur and prawns, and buyers crowded in asking for deshi, or native, fish. A photo feature in Jago News on 2 November 2025 reported that this fish had come from canals, beels, rivers and channels that were drying after the monsoon, and named Rajbari, Gopalganj, Faridpur and Madaripur among the areas where it was being caught. The people catching it, the report said, were not sure their trade would last.

The feature named no fisher and gave no price, catch or water level for that season. The figures in this story therefore come from official and research sources of earlier years. They describe the setting of that morning, not a measurement of it.

Jago News described Dayaganj at dawn as a place where the smell of wet earth mixed with that of fresh fish, and where calls and bargaining filled the air. Fish came in from early morning by truck, van and pushcart. The report said the same supply was driving brisk sales at Karwan Bazar, Shyambazar and the Mirpur markets. Karwan Bazar, in Tejgaon Thana, is described as one of the biggest commodity marketplaces in the capital.

City buyers, the report said, came for a taste they thought of as natural and native, one that carried memories of childhood rivers, beel mud and village sun. Some searched the stalls for shol or prawns. One asked whether a rui had come from a river or a beel.

It was a reasonable question in a country where a fish on a market slab may just as easily have come from a pond. The rui, Labeo rohita, is one of the carps found widely in Bangladesh's fresh waters. A 2024 paper in a fisheries journal of Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia put major carps at more than 21 percent of the national fishery yield, the largest group. A LightCastle Partners summary of the Department of Fisheries yearbook for 2023-24 gave inland closed-water aquaculture 59.34 percent of national production and ponds alone 47.20 percent. The buyers at Dayaganj were looking for the wild-caught part of that supply.

According to the report, the falling water had made fishing in small rural water bodies much easier. Canals that once ran with a steady current held only layers of silt, dry mud and fish trapped in low hollows. Local fishers set traps in those hollows, dragged nets through them and filled their baskets. In the rural markets of Rajbari, Gopalganj, Faridpur and Madaripur, the report listed fish of many kinds and sizes: shol, taki, magur, koi, shing, prawns and even small puti.

The report drew a line between past and present. These fish, it said, had once fed the households that caught them, and had become a product for urban demand. With less work to do on the farm, it added, villagers had taken their nets into the mud of the drying beels.

Both points fit long-standing patterns. Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia, records that in rural areas people fish seasonal waters and beels in winter with traditional gear, and that some do so with no gear at all. The bamboo traps it lists, built in many local shapes, include the polo. Push nets used in beels and floodplains are known as thela jal and moiya jal, and the round cast net is common in the shallows of ponds and beels.

Fishing as a second occupation is also old. Banglapedia's entry on fishermen cites W. W. Hunter's analysis of the 1872 census, which described Muslim as well as Hindu villagers working as fishermen, boatmen or house builders in seasons when their labour was not needed in the fields. Its fisheries entry counts about 11 million people in seasonal or part-time fishing and related work, against about 1.4 million employed full time in fishing and fish farming.

Fish marketing in Bangladesh is almost entirely private. Banglapedia describes a chain that runs from hat, or village, markets through township bazars and assembly centres to urban wholesale and retail markets. Fishers hand their catch to hat traders or to agents of bazar merchants, known as bepari or mahajan. It then passes to wholesale commission agents, the adotdar or paikar, who largely control prices. The fish is packed in baskets with ice and moved by trucks and buses to larger towns. The encyclopedia names ice shortages and poor market structures as key problems.

A report in The Business Standard on 15 March 2023 from the Balikhola market in Kishoreganj shows how the same season works in another part of the country. The district fisheries officer gave the peak there as November to February, when fish worth Tk 3 crore to Tk 4 crore was sold a day, against about Tk 50 lakh off season. Fishers built shelters of branches and bamboo for fish and encircled them with nets as the water receded in winter. Buyers sent the catch to Dhaka and other cities by pickup van, bus and similar transport. Many fishers took dadon, an advance, from the arotdars, which obliged them to sell through that arot. A kilogram of fresh boal that fetched Tk 300 at Balikhola could reach Tk 500 in Dhaka.

Banglapedia's district entries show how much water runs through the places the report named. Faridpur, 2,052.86 square kilometres in area, has the Padma, Old Kumar, Arial Khan and Gorai as its main rivers, and its notable beels include Dhol Samudra, Ramkeli and Shakuner beel. Gopalganj's rivers include the Madhumati, Ghagar and Old Kumar, along with the Wapda canal and the Madaripur Beel Route. Madaripur has the Padma, Arial Khan, Kumar and Ghagor and shares the same canal. Rajbari lists the Padma, Gorai, Chandana and Chitra.

The Madaripur Beel Route shows how long water here has been managed by hand. It was first proposed in 1858, and digging began in 1899. The channel, about 150 metres wide on average, runs from the Arial Khan near Kabirajpur in Madaripur to the Madhumati near Manikdaha in Gopalganj. It became a perennial canal in 1912 and was ready for navigation in 1914. Banglapedia notes that navigation on it is hindered in the dry season and that the government regularly removes sediment. Silt, on a much smaller scale, was also what the Jago News report found left in the village canals.

A beel is a saucer-shaped, marshy depression that collects surface run-off through small channels. Banglapedia says a string of beels along a drainage line may be the remains of a large river that long ago left its course, while others are troughs between rivers that have raised their beds and banks with centuries of silt. A haor is a larger bowl-shaped depression, found mainly in greater Sylhet and greater Mymensingh, that becomes a vast sheet of water in the monsoon.

Much of the country's inland fishery rests on this seasonal rhythm. An FAO analysis of Bangladesh's fish production describes about 2.83 million hectares of seasonal inland waters flooded for about four to six months each wet season, roughly from June to September or October. Banglapedia puts the dry season at about five to six months, from November to April, when most rivers dry up or shrink greatly and most ponds gradually disappear. Inland fish production, it says, is an integrated system of rivers, floodplains, beels and haors, all connected by khals, or canals, with the floodplains serving as nurseries for larval and juvenile fish.

Some smaller beels dry up completely in winter, and their land is then used for cultivation. This is why the Jago News report said such scenes were nothing new after the monsoon. It said this time was a little different, because the fish had come from canals, beels, rivers and channels that had dried up, but it gave no measurement of how far that season differed from others.

Banglapedia counts about 4,500 beels. Its table for 2007-08 gives beels 114,161 hectares and 77,524 tonnes of fish, and floodplains 2,832,792 hectares and 819,446 tonnes. A 2024 Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock country presentation published by INFOFISH listed beels at 114.16 and floodplains at 2,646.24, both in thousands of hectares. Beels are generally richer in fish than rivers, the encyclopedia says, and during the dry winter and summer the central zone of a beel acts as a sanctuary for fish.

Several of the fish in the report are known for living where others cannot. Snakeheads have two accessory air-breathing cavities, according to Banglapedia, which lists five species in Bangladesh: taki, shol, gajar, tila shol and cheng. They live in ponds, swamps, floodplains, reservoirs, lakes and rivers, feed mainly on other fish, and build grassy nests in the pre-monsoon and monsoon months, with both parents guarding the young. The striped snakehead, the shol, moves from rivers and lakes into flooded fields in the wet season and in the dry season returns to permanent water, where it survives by burrowing in the mud.

The koi, or climbing perch, Anabas testudineus, is called by Banglapedia the most preferred fish in Bangladesh for its taste. It must reach the surface to breathe air, which lets it survive stagnant, poor water that kills many other fish. It can crawl across land by wriggling its body with the help of its pectoral fins, and it buries itself in mud in the dry season.

Magur belongs to the walking catfish group. It has an air-breathing organ, does well in stagnant water that is low in oxygen, and can move over ground with a snakelike wiggle to reach other water when its pool dries up. The shing, Heteropneustes fossilis, lives mainly in ponds, ditches, swamps and marshes, and can give a painful sting from a poison gland on its pectoral spine. Banglapedia lists koi, magur, shing, shol, punti and rui among the common fish of beels. Freshwater prawns add to the mix: the ministry's 2024 presentation counted 24 freshwater shrimp species.

This hardiness does not protect the fish from people. As the report described, when the water shrank they were left in low hollows, where a trap or a net could reach them easily.

Department of Fisheries figures cited in the Dhaka Tribune on 26 August 2025 put national output at a record 5.018 million tonnes in 2023-24. Open waters contributed 1.41 million tonnes, aquaculture 2.98 million tonnes and marine fisheries about 628,623 tonnes. LightCastle's summary of the yearbook showed the share of inland capture fisheries falling from 62.59 percent in 1983-84 to 28.13 percent in 2023-24. Open-water fish is not all native small fish either: The Daily Star reported in June 2024 that about half of the 13 lakh tonnes from open water in 2023 was hilsa.

Older records show the pressure on the water itself. Banglapedia gives the catch from rivers and estuaries, leaving out the Sundarbans, as 207,766 tonnes in 1983-84, 173,410 tonnes in 1989-90 and 138,746 tonnes in 1992-93. Floodplain area fell from about 6.3 million hectares in the 1960s to 5.4 million in 1985 and 2.8 million in the late 1980s, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, largely because of flood control and drainage projects. The FAO analysis records average floodplain productivity falling from about 84 to 65 kilograms per hectare a year between 1979-80 and 1986-87, and attributes it mainly to the loss of perennial waters to those projects.

Banglapedia's wetland entry says about 2.1 million hectares of wetland in the Ganges-Brahmaputra floodplain were lost to flood control, drainage and irrigation development. It adds that rural roads and embankments built without regard to local topography caused poor drainage, that embankments block fish migration and breeding, and that many fishers lost their livelihoods. Chalan Beel, in the north, is its best-known example of shrinkage: about 1,085 square kilometres in the early nineteenth century and 368 square kilometres in 1909, of which only 85 stayed under water all year. Most large beels, it says, have shrunk considerably in recent decades.

National totals, meanwhile, were strong. The Daily Star reported on 9 June 2024 that an FAO report had placed Bangladesh second in the world in freshwater fish production, with 13.22 lakh tonnes, and the director general of the Bangladesh Fisheries Research Institute credited conservation of open waters and the hilsa breeding-season ban. The ministry's 2024 presentation said fish supplied 60 percent of the country's animal protein, that consumption stood at 67.80 grams a person a day, and that the sector gave work to 20 million people, full time and part time.

The ministry counted 260 freshwater fish species in 2024. Banglapedia lists 251 inland species, of which 54 face threats: 12 critically endangered, 28 endangered and 14 vulnerable. It says snakeheads, once abundant in ditches, beels and swamps, were becoming scarce, and it names the fish disease epizootic ulcerative syndrome, which struck in 1988, as one of the main reasons.

At a Dhaka workshop on 25 September 2022 for the Department of Fisheries project on conserving and developing native fish and snail species, the then fisheries minister said native fish, the most flavourful, had largely disappeared. BSS reported that he blamed the filling of wetlands, ponds and rivers and excessive pesticide use, and said the research institute and the department had brought back about 37 nearly extinct species.

At a seminar of the institute in Dhaka on 20 August 2025, bdnews24 reported, the fisheries and livestock adviser said about 64 native species had nearly disappeared and that 41 had been brought back through its research. She urged that water bodies across the country be identified to protect native species, condemned fishing with poison or electric shock, and named water and plastic pollution as major causes of damage. The institute, set up in 1984, began work in 1986 and has its headquarters in Mymensingh, with a sub-station at Santahar for studying the floodplain ecosystem. By June 2024 its scientists had developed breeding and farming methods for 40 of the 261 species found in open water, The Daily Star reported.

The reasons for a scarcity are not always agreed. In December 2021 The Daily Star reported dried-fish traders around Chalan Beel saying local fish was scarce, and one blamed a lack of monsoon rain. The district fisheries officer disputed that production had dropped, saying farmers were selling to more markets because demand was strong.

The Bangladesh Water Act 2013 defines a reservoir, jaladhar, as any natural or dug river, canal, beel, haor, baor, dighi, pond, lake or similar holder of water. Under section 20, no person or body may, without the competent authority's permission, block or divert a natural watercourse by building on a reservoir, filling it or lifting soil or sand from it. Section 26 says the whole water of a reservoir may not be drawn off until it is exhausted, though it exempts privately owned reservoirs. In a declared water-stressed area, section 18 sets an order of use that begins with drinking water, household use, agriculture and fish farming.

For towns, a law of 2000 covers playgrounds, open spaces, parks and natural reservoirs in all municipal areas. It treats rivers, canals, beels and other water bodies marked in a master plan as natural reservoirs, forbids changing their class except as the Act allows, and sets a penalty of up to five years in prison, a fine of up to Tk 50,000, or both.

The Protection and Conservation of Fish Act 1950 lets the government make rules on fixed engines, on weirs, dams, bunds and embankments, and on nets and mesh sizes. It also lets the government bar the catching and sale of undersized fish for set periods. Section 4A, added in 2002, bans making, importing, selling, carrying, owning or using the monofilament net called current jal. Banglapedia adds that the rules protect fry and brood fish of shol, gajar and taki from 1 April to 31 August, except for culture.

City people were buying this fish happily, the report said, but those who caught it saw another reality. With the water shrinking, it said, they knew the occupation might not exist the following year, and behind their smiles lay uncertainty. The report quoted no individual fisher on this.

Every canal and beel that dried up lost not only water but life, Jago News argued. It called local water conservation, the re-excavation of canals and the protection of natural reservoirs urgent, and warned that unless the government and civil society came together, deshi fish could one day survive only as a remembered taste. It closed at Dayaganj, where it found the true picture of Bangladesh in water, fish and life together, and asked whether losing that water would cost only the fish, or a piece of culture too.

Photo: Ferdous / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The top picture shows a seller cutting fish at the Jatrabari fish market in Dhaka in 2014, as background; it is not Dayaganj.

Sources: Jago News 24 (2 November 2025), Banglapedia (Beel, Fisheries, Fish, Fishing Gear, Fisherman, Wetland, Snakehead, Carp, Haor, Madaripur Beel Route, Bangladesh Fisheries Research Institute and the Faridpur, Gopalganj, Madaripur and Rajbari entries), FAO (analysis of constraints to fish production in Bangladesh), Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock country presentation, INFOFISH (2024), Dhaka Tribune (26 August 2025), LightCastle Partners (8 September 2025), The Daily Star (4 December 2021; 9 June 2024), The Business Standard (15 March 2023), BSS (25 September 2022), bdnews24 (20 August 2025), Jurnal Perikanan Universitas Gadjah Mada (2024), Bangladesh Water Act 2013, Protection and Conservation of Fish Act 1950 and the 2000 reservoirs Act (bdlaws), Wikipedia (Karwan Bazar, Anabas testudineus, Channa striata, Clarias batrachus, Heteropneustes fossilis)