Puducherry fails to harness potential of fishing sector, says Professor Ramadass

In a statement here, Ramadass said the existing approach and procedures of plan spending by the Puducherry government have to be radically restructured in the backdrop of need for the optimal utilisation of scarce financial and real resource to maximize growth. The ongoing arithmetic exercise of adding or subtracting 10 per cent of previous year’s outlay to determine the current year outlay has to be abandoned and in its place real requirement based methodology has to be substituted.

Plan sectors contributing directly to productivity, production, employment generation, purchasing power and State Domestic Product should be properly identified and prioritised for plan spending after scientifically assessing their requirement of funds.

Keeping these parameters in mind the government can easily choose a dozen productive sectors which can catalyses the overall growth of Puducherry economy, he said.

Ramadass said all four regions of the territory are maritime and they have a coastline of 45 kms, with 675 kms of inshore water and fresh water area of about 2,000 hectares. The fishermen community engaged in fishing in these resources constitutes the third largest community of the territory (about 9 per cent of the UT’s population).

The fishery work force forming 8.64 per cent of the total labour force of the territory produce fishery output which was 53,808 metric tonnes in 2015-16 and 55,191 metric tonnes in 2016-17. Consequently, the contribution of fishery sector to State Domestic Product (SDP) was Rs 247 crore in 2014-15; Rs 294 crore in 2015-16; Rs 298 crore in 2016-17 and Rs 313 crore in 2017-18. 

Fisheries alone produced 17.2 per cent of the total output of the primary sector including agriculture and animal husbandry in the last four years. Besides, fishery sector supplements the food availability and ensures food security to the people, stimulates export growth and development of ancillary industries like net making and boat building. Such a significant sector should have been considered as a priority sector and realising its present and future prospects, the government should have earmarked sufficient plan outlay for its development. However, unfortunately, this predominant productive sector has been receiving a raw deal from the government in the last thirty years.

Without any just and scientific basis, the government has been allocating meager funds to fisheries disproportionate to its requirements. The annual plan expenditure of the Department of Fisheries was just Rs 46 crore in 2014-15; Rs 43 crore in 2015-16; Rs 45 crore in 2016-17 and Rs 47 crore in 2017-18, he pointed out.