In India carp culture project runs successfully for inland carp aquaculture in the region Andhra Pradesh. It is believe that there are improvements still to be made. In February Dr Ravi RamaKrishna, Senior Scientist at the Fisheries Research Station in the West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, took a research team to visit the ‘fish bowl’ of India in the Kolleru Lake area of the State.
Peter Edwards wrote many things about this project for the Network of Aquaculture Centres in Asia Pacific (NACA). He wrote that their intensive four day study tour involved visited fish farms and formal meetings with individual farmers in Mallavaram village in West Godavari district and Bhujabalapatnam village in Krishna district, cooperative fish farmers in Prathikollanka village, in West Godavari district, all by Kolleru Lake; to carp hatcheries and nurseries in the Kaikaluru area of Krishna district; and to fish farms and informal meetings with individual farmers towards Gudivada in Krishna district where a second phase of carp culture development has taken place.
According to Peter Edwards it is difficult to fully appreciate the most impressive but complex aquaculture system he had been shown but that at the very least my comments should stimulate further debate about how to resolve some of the problems and how the system might evolve in the future.
It is told that the technology of the current system of Indian major carp culture in Andhra Pradesh has been mainly developed by local farmers. Dr. Nandeesha said that it is a simplified two-species system in which rohu is dominant with 80-90 percent of the fish biomass and with catla a very profitable 10-20 percent. He added that the production may be described as semi-intensive and indirectly integrated. It is a ‘green water’ system with mainly local off-farm inputs: chicken manure (and chemical fertilizers); supplemented with farm-mixed de-oiled rice bran and oil cake.
