How Better Traceability Can Boost India’s Seafood Sector & Improve Coastal Livelihoods

Someplace off the Chennai Coast, a fisherman hauls in a web earlier than daybreak. By night, his catch has handed by way of a touchdown centre, an public sale shed, a cold-storage unit, and a processing plant. By the next week, it could be on a dinner desk in Doha or Dubai. But at virtually each level in that journey, the report 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 under no circumstances.

This invisibility is India’s most consequential fisheries downside. 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 in recent times, with shrimp alone accounting for practically 40 per cent of whole marine export quantity. 

Fish manufacturing has greater than doubled over the past decade. The programs governing this commerce, nevertheless, haven’t grown with it. Qatar’s short-term 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 could be disrupted when importing nations 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 US Seafood Import Monitoring Program, and the Marine Stewardship Council’s Chain of Custody commonplace are reshaping international commerce, traceability has stopped being non-compulsory. It’s the entry ticket.

However right here is the necessary distinction: if traceability had been purely a know-how downside, India would have resolved it already. A rustic that constructed UPI at extraordinary scale shouldn’t be wanting digital functionality or implementation muscle. The problem in fisheries shouldn’t be technological. It’s behavioural, institutional, and political. The true take a look at shouldn’t be 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 programs, digital catch documentation and IoT-enabled cold-chain sensors can create end-to-end visibility from web to plate. A shopper 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 achieve credibility, regulators achieve oversight, scientists achieve dependable knowledge, and accountable fishers achieve 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 way of 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 cause 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 virtually solely exterior traceability frameworks. India is among the many prime 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 immediately into meal and oil somewhat than offered 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 are foundational to marine meals webs. Together with fish meal and fish oil throughout the nationwide traceability framework shouldn’t be peripheral. It’s important.

That is the place the Marine Merchandise Export Growth Authority’s function should develop considerably. MPEDA registers exporters, screens 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 prolong 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 not certify what a touchdown centre has not recorded.

Essentially the most sturdy traceability fashions globally have labored by way of cooperatives somewhat than compliance mandates imposed on people. Fish Farmer Producer Organisations and fisher cooperatives can function aggregation nodes, recording catches collectively, in regional languages, by way of offline-compatible programs that synchronise when connectivity is on the market. Monetary incentives for verified traceable catch could make participation economically rational somewhat 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 remodel home fisheries governance. None of this will occur in isolation, and none of it’ll occur by way of coverage paperwork alone. What is required is a shared understanding that the ocean’s future and India’s fisheries economic system aren’t 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 coming into a world market ought to carry a clear story of legality, sustainability and equity. Each fisher contributing to that market must be seen inside governance programs, not relegated to its margins. The ocean doesn’t want one other 12 months of declarations. It wants the programs, 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