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Business News/ Politics / News/  Worried by falling hilsa catch, Mamata intervenes
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Worried by falling hilsa catch, Mamata intervenes

Worried by falling hilsa catch, Mamata intervenes

Prized fare: A fishmonger selling hilsa in Kolkata. Premium

Prized fare: A fishmonger selling hilsa in Kolkata.

Kolkata: To shore up sharply falling yields of ilish, a fish prized for its taste and flavour, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has promised alternative employment and rice at 2 a kg to around 200,000 fishermen to ensure they don’t catch it during the breeding season.

Banerjee proposed this radical remedy after the ilish (tenualosa ilisha, also known as hilsa) catch in the state sank to some 657 tonnes in the monsoon months this year from 4,570 tonnes in 2011, according to Prasanta Kumar Jana, deputy director at the state’s fisheries department. The ilish catch peaks in the monsoon.

The supply from Bangladesh, where ilish is the national fish, also fell to a trickle this year.

The poor local catch is blamed on unbridled fishing round the year, even during the breeding seasons of April-May and October-November.

Coupled with Bangladesh’s restrictions on ilish exports, prices rose astronomically. A 1kg ilish, which typically costs between 300 and 400 in the rainy season, sold for as much as 1,200 a kg at Kolkata’s fish markets.

Prized fare: A fishmonger selling hilsa in Kolkata.

The heavily indebted state government, whose borrowings exceed 1 trillion, will now have to find the money to fund this unprecedented welfare scheme.

“The aim is to create employment so that these people are not dependent on fishing all through the year," said Subrata Saha, West Bengal’s minister for fisheries, adding that the poor ilish yield this year has affected thousands of fishermen.

They would typically invest 50,000-60,000 to set sail in a trawler. On a good trip typically lasting up to a week, they would bring enough in each trawler to make more than double the amount the venture costs, Jana said. But this year, most fishermen have not been able to recover investments, he added.

The practice of catching juvenile ilish, weighing 250-500 gm, for years has taken its toll on the catch this year. “If the fish is not allowed to grow, how can you expect it to breed and its stock to expand?" Jana asked.

The other key reason for the decline in the catch is geographical changes in the Sunderbans delta, according to Sandipan Mondal, another deputy director at the state fisheries department. Deficient rainfall in the southern parts of the state, increasing the salinity of the water, has also contributed to the fall in catch.

The mouth of the Hooghly river in the Sunderbans delta has suffered heavy siltation of five-six metres, choking many creeks, he said. Many new islands have emerged blocking the movement of the ilish, forcing the fish to take a new course in and out of the sea.

This has benefitted fishermen in neighbouring Bangladesh and Myanmar. “This explains why the production in Bangladesh and Myanmar has increased this year by an estimated 50,000 tonnes over last year," Mondal said.

The migration of the ilish to the waters of Bangladesh and Myanmar forced Indian fishermen to cast their net even on smaller ones, Mondal said, but it hasn’t helped.

For the past three years, a ban existed on catching juvenile ilish, but the state government hasn’t enforced it strongly until now, according to the fisheries department’s Jana.

The use of fishing nets with mesh size less than 80mm is banned, but fishermen manage to flout the rules with impunity because of their political support, Jana said, adding that several fishermen were booked last year but weren’t eventually punished.

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Published: 16 Aug 2012, 11:33 PM IST
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