The Centre for Strategy and Leadership (CSL), a leading Indian think tank, has released a White Paper on the adoption of modern digital technologies to spur growth of the fisheries sector in the country. This they say will come in handy for the large fishing community in Visakhapatnam.
The paper – IoT in the fisheries sector in India – discusses the importance of new technologies for India to realise optimal green growth in the fisheries sector. It focuses on how technologies like IoT optimise management of scarce resources and increase productivity.
The fisheries sector provides livelihood to approximately 160 lakh people at the primary level and almost double that number along its entire value chain. India is the second largest fish producer in the world, contributing 5.43% to world fish production.
Challenges
The sector faces three major challenges: ensuring fishermen safety while out at sea, maintaining national security by monitoring international borders, and prioritising fisheries as a robust economic activity. Unless digitisation and advanced technology are deployed consistently, these challenges will remain barriers to productivity, growth and safety in the long term.
“The IoT sector will boom to grow to a more than $20-billion market by 2022 as per studies. We believe India’s fisheries sector currently in the middle of a transformation would derive great benefits by the adoption of modern technologies such as IoT. Therefore, bringing IoT to the centre of the sector’s growth model should be prioritised,” Vikas Sharma, director and chief executive, CSL, said in a statement.
The paper also points out that disruptive technologies, such as those being provided by Skylo, the affordable end-to-end solution connecting machine and sensor data via satellite, are critical to meeting the demands of fishermen, boat owners and regulators as industries innovate.
At the heart of the transformation is access to data and cloud-based analytics for unconnected fishing vessels and aquafarms, according to Parthsarathi Trivedi, co-founder and CEO of Skylo.
The paper suggests that all value-chain stakeholders need to be involved in the decision-making process, from fishermen to boat owners to government organizations.
