Illuminating Hidden Harvests Naveen Namboothiri, Marianne Manuel, Tanmay Wagh In order to bring greater attention and pull back the curtain on the role of small scale fisheries in a country’s development, the FAO, WorldFish and Duke University initiated the lluminating Hidden Harvests project. This project is a follow-up to a 2012 study conducted by World…
Marianne Manuel The MuSIC workshop on small scale fisheries, food security and nutrition as held in Penang, Malaysia from the 18 th to the 22 nd of February and organised by WorldFish and FAO. The former is part of the CGAIR group of international research institutions and focuses on research around better fish production (inland…
Karishma Modi At the after-school learning programme, we have come to accept that change is not always dramatic. It often takes the shape of a very small, suddenly apparent step forward and signals a time to pause and reflect on what led up to it. One Monday afternoon at the end of January, we broke…
Shimul Bijoor, Deepika Sharma and Madhuri Ramesh During the first phase of our project, wherein we studied the governance and management of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in the Andamans, we observed the keen influence of tourism on the way that most spaces in the islands are governed. Tourism influenced which islands were better connected by…
By Tanmay Wagh and Madhuri Ramesh The Andaman and Nicobar islands are at the centre of multiple developmental activities with the tourism industry forming the major thrust area for economic development. With the growing impetus to tourism through subsidies, easy land acquisitions and higher connectivity, the number of tourism-related businesses have increased exponentially in…
By Mythreyi K In early December 2018, James and I headed to West Bengal to conduct a birdwatching workshop for budding tourist guides. The workshop took us all the way from Wandoor in the Andamans to the island of Kumirmari in the Sunderbans. Sunderban, “the only Mangrove-Tiger land of the planet” (Banerjee M, 2012) was…
By Tanya Koshy One of the most remarkable things about field visits is its ability to jolt you back to reality. Vulnerable communities who were earlier mere statistics in a larger, impersonal statistical picture that we absentmindedly scroll through as we sip our morning cup of chai, suddenly come to life as real people with real…
By Shiba Desor The Karen community settled in the Andaman Islands in the early 1920s. A forest-dependent community from erstwhile Burma, the Karens quickly developed linkages with the natural environment of the islands. Along with having a good traditional and developed knowledge of the forest and the sea, the Karens are adept craftspersons of wood,…
Commercialisation of Fisheries Bycatch Trisha Gupta, Chetan Rao, Muralidharan M, Kartik Shanker, Naveen Namboothri Commercial fisheries catch a large volume and diversity of non-target species in their nets, known as bycatch. Although once discarded, with diminishing catches of commercial species and a growing demand for seafood and other products, many bycatch species are increasingly retained…
