From bycatch to ‘buycatch’: Understanding trawl fisheries in India

Dakshin Foundation is a Bengaluru-based organisation whose mission is to inform and advocate for conservation and natural resource management while promoting and supporting sustainable livelihoods, social development and environmental justice.

Abhilasha Sharma, Programme Associate for Sustainable Fisheries at Dakshin, describes the history of bottom trawling in India, explores the embedded inequities that have led to conflict with other sectors and outlines how the growth of ‘reduction fisheries’ have allowed economically inefficient bottom trawl operations to continue, to the detriment of small-scale fishers and coastal ecosystems.