In a first of its kind in Mumbai, a seafood restaurant is offering fresh fishes directly from the farms. While farmers are troubled with price elevation of their products due to several mediators taking their cut, this city-based pisciculture farmer has opened his own outlet named The Bombay Fish and Chips Company which is offering fresh fish directly from his farms. Quitting his 9-5 corporate job in order to join as a full time pisiculture farmer, Mangesh Pawar has finally got his foot in the door. Pawar had started the seventh fish farming project in Maharashtra and the first in Raigad District. With an idea to directly sell fresh fish to the end users, Pawar decided to offer seafood dishes that we rarely get in Mumbai. The seafood restaurant located at Chembur has its own 450-acre farm that produces more than 2.5 tons of fish every month. Out of these only 500-kgs are brought to the restaurant and the rest is sold to the wholesale market. The restaurant offers a range of fish dishes along with the famous English origin dish named Fish and Chips. Commenting on the demand for fishery products in the country, Pawar says that he has plans to involve more farmers into fish farming and educate them about direct selling. He said, I was luckily introduced to Prashant Khapane and Nitin Kamath of Leo Aquatica Agro company through whom I learned almost everything about fish farming. Pawar says that the pisiculture farmers need support on a larger scale to help their products reach the end users. Selling it to mediators like wholesalers and then vendors that surely gives you quick money but yields less profit. Despite having my own seafood restaurant, I still sell majority of the fishes from my farms to the wholesalers and the rest is brought to the restaurant. Interestingly, Pawar earns an equal amount of profit from both, selling it to wholesalers or selling it through the restaurant. Criticising the mediation that has been affecting farmers for a very long time, Pawar says that delivering fresh fishes from the farms directly to the end users is what every farmer looks forward to. He said, I am not asking people to stop eating fish that comes to your doorstep, instead I am asking them to see how it has been treated through several mediators who might have washed them in uncleaned water. If the consumer is paying the right amount then the least he expects is fresh fish. Considering the rapid growth in fish farming industry in the recent years, the Maharashtra government has been encouraging pisciculture farmers to take up cultivation of fresh water fish found in water reservoirs. Currently, the state ranks fourth in the country in freshwater farming. It cultivates 1.5 lakh metric tonnes fish a year on an average. India is the second-largest aquaculture producer after China, with 10.79 million tons of fish production during 2016-17 fiscal year. Since there is annual export of fish and aquaculture crossing to Rs 300 billion, experts have cited that the fish farming sector has capacity for further growth, stating that there is huge potential to increase domestic consumption as well as exports.