Livelihood potential of waterbodies and aquatic food system

At one place we are making effort to reduce water footprint and creat opportunity to provide water resources for community. At the other end ,millions of unexplored small and seasonal water resources in form of farm ponds, tanks , community ponds are under utilised to open up new laters of livelihood.
Freshwater fish production, makhana, waterchestnut, Lotus stem etc are not explored to its full potential towards creating livelihood and food security in rural India.
Effort on enhancing productivity creates ample job opportunity for rural retailers, supply chain agents and women in particulars.
Jaljeevika ( www.jaljeevika.org) is working in this space and creating a climate resilient ecosystem through satellite image based cluster planning approach in flood affected zone if Bihar and drought affected zone of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra.
Above that carbon sequestration capabilities of pond is hardly studied in academic section. It has another opportunity to engage community driven carbon market.
We are open to collaborate with NGO and philanthropy to take it forward.

4 Likes

Thanks for putting this up. Would be interested to know what your efforts have led to and what your learnings are?

1 Like

Jaljeevika started work with tribal communities, proposed water based livelihood models in resource poor places like Malkangiri, palamu , Gadchiroli, Purnia, , Bundelkhand region . During last ten years intervention, our impact nos are worked with more than 30000 fish farmers, engaged more than 4000 women into fisheries based livelihood, convergence support of 20 Cr over through government program and created system to enhance 30% more fish productivity from waterbodies

Our delivery mechanism are:

  1. establish aquaschool for community based extension services, provide water quality based pond management advisory system, engage profesionally qualified youth as aquafellow to provide hand holding support to cooperatives and FPO.
  2. Aquafund : provide easy credit support to fish farmers, micro entrepreneur and women fish vendors
  3. AquaEDP : bring enterprise development hand holding support to FPO, cooperative and young aspirants.link them to govt scheme.

Over the year, we learnt:

  • water as a productive resources needs to be linked with aquatic food system
  • Adding component of climate resilience and adaptation in flood affected zone and drought hit area along with integrated farming model suits community
  • Engaging panchayat, MGNREGA,Govt program, cooperative and FPO model through large scale govt program is a sustainable measure
  • Technology solution related to intensive farming models for small holder is a scalable solution. We are seen it through implementation of recirculation aquaculture model.
  • Engaging gender component though women fish vendors is impactful intervention.

A small video on implementing recirculation aquaculture system with tribal women in Alirajpur district is available at मिनी RAS तकनीक से मछली पालन Mini RAS unit in Alirajpur by Jaljeevika's success story - YouTube
. For more detail on our scalable plan and process , feel free to write us at [email protected]

1 Like