Meena Sahu, a shrimp collector

It was a profitable venture in the the 1980s and 1990s. But shrimp farming, the livelihood of many in the Sunderbans, has hit a terrible low. MAUREEN NANDINI MITRA finds out why

Squatting on the slippery, clay-covered jetty, her thin cotton saree dripping wet, Meena Sahu, scoops water out of her bucket with a broken clam shell, transfers it to a white enamelled iron bowl and counts the fine, threadlike prawn seedlings that are now clearly visible. “Twenty-five…28… 29…” her lips count silently as she squints into the bowl. All morning Sahu has been treading the shallows by her island village, Dulki, dragging a fine mesh net behind her. Sahu is a meendhara, a seedling catcher.

Like thousands of other women, children and sometimes, even men, in the Sunderbans, she stands in waist deep water for up to 10 hours a day, trawling for bagda meen, or black tiger shrimp seedlings.

Every 1,000 live seedlings she catches will fetch Sahu Rs 60 from the arabdar, local trader, who will then sell them to shrimp farms and wholesale markets, further inland for at least twice the price. The farms will sell the grown prawns to big export companies that will behead, freeze and ship them to Japan, the us and eu countries. Some of Sahu’s seedlings could well land up in the us $25 (Rs 1,220) shrimp cocktail of a high-end Manhattan restaurant.

It takes Sahu up to six days to catch 1,000 seedlings. She makes about Rs 240 a month from this work, barely enough for even one person to scrape by, even in this remote region of West Bengal. “Fifteen years ago I could have got up to Rs 1,800, for 1,000 seedlings, but it’s different now,” she said. Market, technology and environmental concerns related to the shrimp industry have changed over the years, leading to a change in the fortunes of meendharas like her.


The money trail

Shrimp aquaculture in coastal West Bengal dates back over 200 years to a time when it was carried out within a mixed rice-shrimp polyculture system. Paddy fields were allowed to flood at the beginning of the growing season, permitting young wild shrimps to enter the fields. The full-sized shrimps were gathered after harvesting paddy. In the 1950s and 1960s, this system led to the establishment of permanent ponds, behries, which were stocked almost entirely with wild-caught seedlings. According to the state government’s figures, brackish water farms cover an estimated 48,000 ha of the West Bengal coast. Of this about 4,678 hectares is under commercial farming; traditional behries take up the remaining area.

Shrimp farming took off in a big way in India’s coastal states in the late 1980s when the government began exporting shrimp to Japan, the us and eu nations. Around this time, West Bengal’s export of fishery products, which almost exclusively is in frozen shrimp, grew exponentially—from about Rs 2.5 crore in the 1970s to over Rs 60 crore in the 1980s.

Black tiger shrimp seedlings
Photo: Maureen Nandini Mitra

The sharp rise in exports proved a windfall for the people of Sunderbans since the region was the only source of black tiger seedlings for breeding farms that were sprouting up all along India’s eastern and south-western coastline. By the early 1990s, shrimp seedlings had become a major source of income for many impoverished families in the Sunderbans. The market was booming and a family could earn more than Rs 7,000 or more a month working their nets. “The catch varies from season to season, but it is the highest around September and October when high tides bring in seedlings that have hatched during the monsoons,” Sahu said.