Total marine capture fish landings touch 3.78 million tonnes

The total marine capture fish landings from the Indian coast, touched 3.78 million tonnes last year, a dip of four per cent compared to 2012, with Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Kerala contributing the major share.
Gujarat accounted for 7.17 lakh tonnes of fish landings, the highest, followed by Tamil Nadu 6.88 lakh tonnes and Kerala 6.71 lakh tonnes, Dr A Gopalakrishanan, Director of the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute told reporters after releasing the Marine fish landings in India 2013 report.
Five states, including Kerala, witnessed decreased landings whereas six states and Union territories saw enhanced landings.
The fall is mainly due to dip in the landings of Indian oil sardines, which was six lakh in 2013 against 7.2 lakh tonnes in 2012 and this has reflected in overall landings.

Dr Gopalakrishnan said they were anticipating that this year, the fish landings would touch four million tonnes.
Estimates of fish landings from the Indian coast, barring Andaman and Nicobar islands and Lakshadweep islands, showed 3.78 million tonnes in 2013 against previous year's estimate of 3.94 million tonnes, which was an all time high.

West Bengal accounted for 2.62 lakh tonnes, Odisha 1.24 lakh tonnes, Karnataka 4.37 lakh tonnes and Andhra Pradesh 2.66 lakh tonnes.
Though the Indian oil sardine dominated the marine capture landings with record production in 2012, the reduction is about 1.2 lakh tonnes last year.
Hilsa landings from West Bengal showed a slight improvement to 41,448 tonnes as against 21,901 tonnes in 2011 and 9,981 tonnes in 2012, but still below the level of 84,000 tonnes in 2010, he said.

The landings of Indian mackerel showed slight improvement from 1.7 lakh tonnes in 2012 to 2 lakh tonnes still below the 2.8 lakh tonnes mark in 2011.
There was a fall of oil sardines from Kerala last year.
Overall production of the landings indicates that there is no immediate threat to the fisheries sector.
Though Kerala has shown a dip in the catch due to reduction in the most dominant resource of Indian oil sardine, there is no reduction in the catch per boat involved in fishing. Thus it can be inferred that the reduction in catch is due to less number of fishing days in Kerala which could be due to inclement weather and rough seas.

CMFRI has sampled 7,860 days across 1,511 landing centres of the coast which has yielded the sampling of 71,920 crafts which have landed at various centres.