The Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute (CIFRI), Bengaluru, has launched a mobile application based on electronic data acquisition system in Karapuzha and Banasura Sagar reservoirs to collect accurate data on inland fish catch from these reservoirs.
Speaking to The Hindu on Sunday after attending a training programme for selected tribal fishermen in the district on use of the mobile application, M. Karthikeyan, senior scientist CIFRI said that in inland fisheries, collection of fish catch data was fraught with difficulties because of multiplicity of factors such as inland water bodies being innumerable, geographically widespread and the fish landing centres being mostly inaccessible.
“Apart from this, acute shortage of manpower and shortage of funds has hampered the fishery departments of different States in the data collection process. Hence, there is a need for innovative data acquisition methods as conservative methods of data collection have become almost untenable primarily because of cost and time constraints,” Mr. Karthikeyan said.
“The mobile app developed by the CIFRI takes care of these obstacles. Any fisherman can be trained to use it within 10 minutes,” he said. All that they have to do is to type the numbers against the names of different fish varieties. As soon as the uploading of data is done, it is automatically recorded in the central server, he said.
“We have selected two ‘Fishery Friend’ from the tribal communities during the training programme and they will upload the data on the mobile phone on the different types of fish caught in the water bodies assigned to them,” M. Firozkhan, Scientist-in-Charge, CIFRI, said.
They would be provided Rs.500 a day as honorarium. The members of the fisheries cooperatives would provide information on their daily fish catch to the Fishery Friends.
“We are planning to implement the project in major water bodies of the State soon,” Mr. Firozkhan said.
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