India's largest Fisheries Research Body Turns 70- CMFRI's Legacy and Few Recent Achievements

Abstract

The Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI), currently celebrating its platinum jubilee year of formation, was established as a Marine Fisheries Research Station on 3'“' February 1947 in Madras. The institute later joined Indian Council of Agricultural Research, (ICAR) family in 1967 and started functioning as a premier research establishment to undertake marine fisheries research in the country. Apart from the estimation of marine fish landings, its valuation and taxonomic studies, the research activities of CMFRI are diversified to a variety of niche areas such as sea farming and coastal mariculture, development of hatchery technologies for commercially viable marine fish species, cage farming, biotechnological applications of marine resources, biodiversity studies, development of sustainable ecosystem management interventions, policy studies and so on. Apart from the Headquarters, the ICAR-CMFRI has 11 Regional Research Centres located at Mandapam Camp, Visakhapatnam, Veraval, Mumbai, Chennai. Calicut, Karwar, Tuticorin, Vizhinjam, Mangalore and Digha (newly established during the 70"' year), in addition to fifteen field centres throughout the coastal belts of the country and 1 KVK at Njarakkal, Ernakulam. The CMFRI team presently comprises of 154 scientists and over 600 other staff working at the CMFRI in as many as 10 research divisions.