Melghat farmers keen to adopt sustainable fishery

NAGPUR: Sustainable livelihood through fish farming is possible in Melghat and hence there is no need to poison the water bodies to catch few small fish now, experiments have shown.
With fishery taking momentum in Melghat Tiger Reserve, NGO the Nature Conservation Society Amravati (NCSA) feels that wildlife deaths due to poisoning will reduce drastically.
After a series of workshops on sustainable fishery over in the last two years, these efforts seem to be bearing fruitfuls in Melghat.One such workshop to introduce local fishermen to the provisions of Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), 1996 and sustainable fishery practices was conducted recently at NCSA’s Muthawa community centre in Harisal in collaboration with the fisheries department, Amravati.
Around 30 fishermen participated in the workshop, who were explained about the standard practices to be followed to new committees and some advanced techniques to old committees already fishing.
Kishor Rithe, member, Maharashtra State Biodiversity Board (MSBB), requested self help groups (SHGs) at Bori to present their success story to the participants. Tribals from Bori SHG explained their community experiment and told how they sold a fish catch, first at the village and later in the market. One of the SHGs alone earned more than Rs 10,000 and Rs 12,000.
The profit was also contributed to village joint forest management committee (JFMC). It is to be noted that Bori village activity was coordinated by a SHG and generated good income after selling excess fish catch in the village itself as well as local market.
As a part of convergence programme launched by district administration, a JFMC of Bori had provided an initial amount to SHG to start this activity on a condition to repay back this amount. The NCSA staff had conducted meetings with the forest staff and members of SHG and JFMC to further discuss the fund repay issue.
Thanks to Prashant Khade, assistant conservator of forest (ACF) of West Melghat forest division for his support to this initiative, SHG members agreed and decided to deposit 25% of their profit through fish farming in JFMC’s account.
NCSA has promoted to run the domestic fishing programmes in the newly constructed water bodies in Melghat buffer villages so that villagers maintain the water bodies too. It has also helped to meet the protein requirement of local tribal.
“We expect that this will also help to divert tribals from bush meat hunting. The practice of poisoning the waterholes for getting a fish catch will also be stopped. It will definitely reduce the deaths of wild animals due to poisoning waterholes,” said Rithe.