Three weeks from today the annual fishing ban for a period of 61 days, from June 1 to July 31, will come into force and all types of fishing vessels will have to anchor at the jetties and shores. With the ban on fishing, the demand for imported fish grows as Goa and Goans never stop consuming fish.
After nearly five years of pressing the panic button, the skeletons of formalin-laced fish have begun to haunt Goans once again. Goans will recall how after July 12, 2018, overnight the state was struck with a hue and cry about consuming fish laced with the carcinogenic (formalin) which would lead to cancer. Fish imports were nearly banned with a strict vigil at the borders and testing of fish samples in every vehicle before crossing the borders. Fish had become a commodity to smuggle into the State. Viral videos of skin peeling off mackerels were making the rounds on social media and with a lack of transparency from the government, the population was bound to respond with panic.
However, far from the binary of infested and not, the government has a task at hand of understanding the deeper unrest amongst Goan fishermen. The fishing community from South Goa has begun to display their angst by demanding a total ban on fish import, while expressing their capability to meet the fish demands of the State.
Statistically, in seven out of Goa’s twelve talukas 39 villages are actively involved in the fishing. According to the Fisheries Department, nearly 3,500 crafts are engaged in fishing activity, including mechanized purse-seiners, trawlers, and motorized and non-motorized canoes. Annually, Goan fishermen bring in more than one lakh metric tonnes of fish, worth more than Rs 1,500 crore, on the 27 fish landing jetties and ramps across the State. Goa exports nearly Rs 600 crore of fish annually.
Despite being a coastal state, Goa has not been able to tap into the potential nature has provided at its disposal, and over the decades, mining has remained the single big industrial focus for economic growth, only to be provided with a backup by the tourism sector during the last decade of mining activity shut down. Fishing as an industry has not been explored to its optimum despite having ample opportunity and resources for the blue economy.
In June last year, the then newly appointed Fisheries Minister Nilkanth Halarnkar had said that the Central government-sponsored schemes for fishermen had evoked a poor response in the State. He was specifically pointing to the Goa State Mariculture Policy 2020. However, the question that remains is of the efforts the government is putting in to promote fishing as a primary source of income amongst the millennials, Gen Z, and looking into the future Gen Alpha.
The Fisheries Department needs introspection of the efforts in taking these schemes to the people in the form of ‘Sarkar Tumchya Daari’ and ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat Swayampurna Goem’. Goans have had to depend on colleges outside the State for undergraduate degree courses in fisheries. Not a single course out of nearly 20 diploma courses offered by the Directorate of Technical Education and more than 40 ITI courses offered by the Directorate of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship have a course related to the fishing sector.
The Goan fishing industry is heavily dependent on human resources from outside the State even while the unemployment rate within the State is consistently above 10 percent. The potential for the processed fish food industry is humongous, even as aquaculture techniques have witnessed tremendous advancements and those considered as first-world countries reaping the rewards of tapping the potential. It would be prudent for the Goa government to ponder upon the adage, ‘Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’.