Women make up nearly 44 percent of India's inland fishers, 10.10 million of 23.12 million, according to a country profile of India's inland small-scale fisheries prepared by the Bay of Bengal Programme Inter-Governmental Organisation (BOBP-IGO) with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), AgroSpectrum reports. The profile says women's post-harvest work and unpaid family labour are not properly recorded, and calls for that work to be made visible in fisheries statistics and planning.
It identifies pollution, habitat degradation and broken river connectivity as key concerns. Competing demands for water, including irrigation, along with floods, droughts and reservoir drawdown, add pressure on fish stocks and the people who depend on them. Insecure fishing access and leasing arrangements, and overlapping responsibilities among fisheries, irrigation, forest, revenue and local authorities, also need attention.
The profile was presented at the launch workshop for a National Plan of Action on Small-Scale Inland Fisheries in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, organised by India's Department of Fisheries with BOBP-IGO and hosted by the state government, with technical oversight from FAO and scientific support from ICAR fisheries institutes. The plan is to follow FAO's Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries.
"Maintaining aquatic habitats and accounting for fisheries in wider water-resource planning are important to sustaining fish populations and local livelihoods," said Dr P Krishnan, director of BOBP-IGO, which gives technical support for such national plans across the Bay of Bengal countries. He said subsistence fishing and informal marketing are under-represented in statistics, and that better data on fishers, catches and individual water bodies would help authorities target support and measure the sector's contribution to livelihoods and food security.
Photo: David M. (women fishing for shells on a river shore at Pakhiralay, West Bengal) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Source: AgroSpectrum
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