Someplace off the Chennai Coast, a fisherman hauls in a internet earlier than daybreak. By night, his catch has handed by a touchdown centre, an public sale shed, a cold-storage unit, and a processing plant. By the next week, it might be on a dinner desk in Doha or Dubai. But at nearly each level in that journey, the document of the place this fish got here from, the way it was caught, and whether or not it was legally harvested exists solely as a handwritten entry in a ledger, or by no means.
This invisibility is India’s most consequential fisheries drawback. And the implications are now not summary.
India is now one of many world’s largest seafood producers. The marine fisheries sector helps practically 30 million livelihoods and contributes about one per cent to nationwide GVA. Seafood exports crossed Rs 65,000 crore in worth lately, with shrimp alone accounting for practically 40 per cent of complete marine export quantity.
Fish manufacturing has greater than doubled during the last decade. The techniques governing this commerce, nonetheless, haven’t grown with it. Qatar’s non permanent ban on Indian frozen seafood and China’s earlier suspension of shipments from a number of Indian seafood-processing models confirmed how shortly market entry may be disrupted when importing international locations increase food-safety, documentation or source-control issues. These weren’t remoted incidents. They had been market verdicts on a provide chain that can’t account for itself.
In an period when the European Union’s import management rules, the USA Seafood Import Monitoring Program, and the Marine Stewardship Council’s Chain of Custody normal are reshaping world commerce, traceability has stopped being non-obligatory. It’s the entry ticket.
However right here is the essential distinction: if traceability had been purely a know-how drawback, India would have resolved it already. A rustic that constructed UPI at extraordinary scale isn’t wanting digital functionality or implementation muscle. The problem in fisheries isn’t technological. It’s behavioural, institutional, and political. The actual take a look at isn’t constructing the device. It’s persuading the fisherman to belief it.
This isn’t to say the know-how is irrelevant. QR codes, RFID tags, vessel monitoring techniques, digital catch documentation and IoT-enabled cold-chain sensors can create end-to-end visibility from internet to plate. A client in Frankfurt may, in precept, scan a packet of Indian prawns and confirm when and the place it was caught, whether or not it met sustainability requirements, and whether or not it handed food-safety checks at each stage. That stage of transparency modifications incentives throughout your entire system: exporters acquire credibility, regulators acquire oversight, scientists acquire dependable information, and accountable fishers acquire recognition.
The issue is that know-how arrives on the shoreline and stops.
India has, to its credit score, begun responding with intent. The 2025 “Nationwide Framework on Traceability in Fisheries and Aquaculture” marks the primary time India has tried a unified governance structure connecting fishers, vessels, touchdown centres, processors and exporters by shared digital infrastructure.
The Pradhan Mantri Matsya Kisan Samridhi Sah-Yojana, a sub-scheme underneath the bigger PM Matsya Sampada Yojana, locations traceability at its operational centre, channeling funding particularly towards formalising fishers and constructing supply-chain documentation capability. These are significant commitments. The query is whether or not a fisher in Rameswaram will ever see a motive to make use of it.
Fish Meal and Fish Oil
Critically, fish meal and fish oil, which collectively symbolize a considerable and rising phase of marine manufacturing, stay nearly completely exterior traceability frameworks. India is among the many high producers of fish meal globally, supplying aquaculture feed each domestically and for export.
But the species composition, sourcing zones and catch documentation for discount fisheries, the place fish are processed straight into meal and oil reasonably than bought for human consumption, are poorly monitored. This hole is ecologically vital as a result of discount fisheries can masks overfishing of small pelagic species which can be foundational to marine meals webs. Together with fish meal and fish oil inside the nationwide traceability framework isn’t peripheral. It’s important.
That is the place the Marine Merchandise Export Improvement Authority’s position should increase considerably. MPEDA registers exporters, displays residue ranges, facilitates certification and maintains India’s place in compliance-driven markets. It has piloted traceability initiatives for shrimp and is more and more participating with digital documentation.
However MPEDA’s attain should now lengthen deeper into the home provide chain, working with touchdown centres and cooperatives to construct the documentation infrastructure that export compliance finally relies upon upon. An exporter can’t certify what a touchdown centre has not recorded.
Probably the most sturdy traceability fashions globally have labored by cooperatives reasonably than compliance mandates imposed on people. Fish Farmer Producer Organisations and fisher cooperatives can function aggregation nodes, recording catches collectively, in regional languages, by offline-compatible techniques that synchronise when connectivity is on the market. Monetary incentives for verified traceable catch could make participation economically rational reasonably than merely regulatory.
The institutional problem is equally urgent. The Division of Fisheries, CMFRI, FSSAI, MPEDA, coastal States and regional our bodies every maintain a part of the reply, however they nonetheless function too usually in parallel. State-level Marine Fishing Regulation Acts (MFRAs) should even be amended to recognise digital documentation and create penalties for unreported catch. So long as traceability stays solely an export-compliance mechanism, it’ll by no means rework home fisheries governance. None of this could occur in isolation, and none of it’ll occur by coverage paperwork alone. What is required is a shared understanding that the ocean’s future and India’s fisheries economic system will not be separate issues.
This 12 months’s World Oceans Day theme, “Reimagine: Past the World We Know, A New Relationship with Our Ocean,” asks for one thing more durable than consciousness. It asks for structural transformation. For India, meaning accepting that the ocean economic system can’t be measured solely in export volumes. It should even be measured within the well being of fish shares, the safety of coastal livelihoods, and the integrity of the provision chains that join each.
Each fish getting into a worldwide market ought to carry a clear story of legality, sustainability and equity. Each fisher contributing to that market ought to be seen inside governance techniques, not relegated to its margins. The ocean doesn’t want one other 12 months of declarations. It wants the techniques, social, institutional and digital, to lastly make that story legible.
Vijai Dharmamony
Senior Supervisor, Local weather Resilient Fisheries,
Environmental Protection India Basis
Nidhi Agarwal
Environmental Protection India Basis
