The real crisis in India’s fisheries

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India is surrounded by a relatively narrow continental shelf, where fishing is always the most productive | Photo Credit: Getty Images

India has a very large and old marine fishing population.

Every day, both small-scale and mechanised trawl fishers go out to earn a living and provide the nation with food.

The Government of India recently released its latest prognosis of the country’s ocean fisheries (February 11, 2026).

Its press release emphasised that Indian marine fisheries are largely sustainable, suggesting the country has avoided the bane of international fishing, namely overfishing.

Drawing on figures compiled by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI), the government said that most commercial fish stocks “are in good health”.

Furthermore, it stated that “91.1% of the 135 fish stocks evaluated in different regions during 2022 were found sustainable.” If this assessment is accurate, it would be good news.

However, there are good reasons to doubt whether it is indeed correct.

For one, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is far more reserved in its assessment of the condition of Indian marine fisheries than the Indian government seems to be.

India’s country profile argues that “India’s marine fisheries production reached a plateau as most major stocks are fully exploited. […] Unregulated access to these fisheries resulted in significant overcapacity, especially of medium and small trawlers that compete over dwindling fishery resources with mostly impoverished small-scale fishers.” This message is not half as buoyant as the one published by the Indian government.

I will not dispute CMFRI’s conclusions or its methodology for calculating ‘sustainability’.

After all, most of its procedures are veiled in secrecy.

What is known, however, is that compared with many other fishing nations, CMFRI continues to rely primarily on landing data rather than stock assessments.

In other words, it calculates the availability of fish stocks in India’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) — which includes up to 200 nautical miles (371 km) of sea area around the country — based on what fishermen catch.

Even a layperson can understand that finding a certain number of shells on the beach does not necessarily predict the quantity of shells in the sea.

Other nations, therefore, make use of stock assessments at sea itself, thereby calculating how much aquatic life is available in certain waters.

This is obviously the more reliable method to determine the health of fish stocks.

The Government of India cannot be blamed for not yet adopting this more costly form of stock assessment.

But it does raise suspicions that the race to catch up with China, which is also infecting the fisheries sector, may also be inducing a hidden bias in the figures.

Among the fishers I have spoken to over thirty years along the Tamil Nadu coast, the consensus is that catches have consistently gone down and that many species that were formerly available have disappeared.

The government, however, seems to continue on the path of amplifying fish production figures from one year to the next.

Overfishing, however, is not the central issue here.

The more pressing concern is the decline, if not the destruction, of the inshore benthic environment.

Over the past year, numerous fisheries scientists and policymakers have described the inshore fishing environment as “destroyed”.

What exactly do they mean?

India is surrounded by a relatively narrow continental shelf, where fishing is always the most productive.

This continental shelf is broadest in Gujarat and a part of Maharashtra, but remains quite narrow along the rest of the sub-continent.

Generally speaking, one can assume that the territorial seas — a legal category referring to waters that lie within 12 nautical miles (or 22 km) from shore — largely overlap with the continental shelf.

These waters provide favourable ecological conditions for commercially valuable species such as shrimp to feed, breed and grow.