Conservation Orientation about Fishes in Northern India

Abstract

Co-management, i.e. sharing responsibility for resource management between the government and user groups, is widely seen as a key to improving fisheries management and reducing over exploitation. Several factors may determine the success of any co-management policy or programme for conservation and sustainable management of resources. One such important factor is the kind of orientation that the resource users have about the conservation of their resources. Therefore, a study was undertaken at selected sites of three states namely, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to assess the conservation orientation of the members of fishing cooperative societies. A total of 580 fishermen who were members and 35 non-members of cooperative societies were taken as respondents. An index was prepared to measure the orientation of the members of the fishing cooperative societies towards conservation of fishery resources. The findings indicated that the overall conservation orientation of the members was high in HP and MP whereas, it was low in UP. Though the overall conservation orientation of the members at the selected sites of both HP and MP was higher, the sense of responsibility and sense of capability towards conservation was higher among the members at Tawa and Bergi reservoirs of MP.