Book Reviews : Hrishikes Bhattacharya, Commercial Exploitation of Fisheries— Production, Marketing and Finance Strategies, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, 327 pp

Abstract

India being a peninsula and endowed with plentiful inland water resources has a large variety of fish stocks. Commercial exploitation of Indian fishery began only in the 1970s. The impetus came primarily from the growing importance of shrimp in the export market. All attention was focused on developing shrimp fishery. India soon emerged as the leading exporter of shrimp. In the following years, the Indian seafood industry became predominantly shrimp-oriented. Not much attempt has been made to diversify the industry nor there was any attempt to create a domestic base for the seafood export industry, which would have enabled them to withstand shocks coming from the vagaries of world I market, which is major cause of present-day crisis of the industry. The high pressure on shrimp’ fisheries has caused overfishing of oceanic resources, which made the industry turn towards aquaculture. Unfortunately, aquaculture in India became synonymous with shrimp culture. There is an urgent need to come out of this shrimp orientation and broadbase itself by diversifying to other fisheries. The study undertaken finds that an optimal marketing strategy for India, with focus on strengthening the marketing of fish in fresh, chilled and frozen form while keeping the specialty fish market in prepared and preserved form for high net worth companies with the necessary managerial and technical skills is desirable. However, this advantage is not exploited due to lack of technical and financial power to process, pre-