Sustainable livelihood through fish cage culture: Case of Chandil reservoir in Jharkhand

Abstract

Chandil is one of the largest reservoir with 18000 hectare (ha) area in Jharkhand and has 933 cages from which about 4 tonnes of fish is produced/cage/year. Impact assessment of cage culture on livelihoods of fisheries dependent people was done using sustainable livelihood framework having human, social, natural, physical, and financial capital as the asset pentagon. Interviews were done with 200 fisheries dependent people who scored their perceptions on a 5 point Likert scale for each livelihood capital before and after adoption of cage culture and percent changes were computed along with Wilcoxon sign-rank test to test if differences were statistically significant. There was positive impact on all livelihood capitals with human capital having maximum impact (34.66%) followed by social capital (30.99%), financial capital (28.90%), physical capital (25.95%) and natural capital (20.85%). However, area of agricultural land had decreased and had a statistically significant negative impact as people lost agricultural land due to reservoir construction. Statistically significant difference was found between before-after scores at 5% level of significance for all livelihood capitals. Cage culture has been able to provide flow of financial capital and had capacity to contribute to other forms of livelihood capitals like investment in assets, food, health, production equipment, education, and housing.