Ecosystem approach to sustainable aquaculture for smallholder farmers

With large areas of water and diverse fish species, India could strengthen fishery-based livelihood systems for billions of its people. Current levels of fish productivity could be doubled by enhancing management practices and bringing small and seasonal ponds into fish production systems. The challenges for developing fisheries and aquaculture in India is lack of knowledge on innovative, locally suitable technologies and better management practices (BMPs); limited supplies of locally produced quality fish seed; low manpower for fish seed production/fish farming; lack of capital and insufficient credit facilities/private sector investments; and problems in scaling. In this paper, we propose a digital solution to address the unavailability of standardized and reliable data at the production point, one of the key set of data items in enabling an ecosystem approach and make a case for an open data exchange platform for the fisheries sector to strengthen the value chain.